There is a house a little south of D.C. that is, most of the time, just a house. A tidy, brick-faced single-family home on a quiet street full of other similar, unassuming homes.
You might not even notice it, unless you happened to be passing by as an elegantly dressed R&B singer and his eight-piece band took over the front lawn to play a quick set, as happens every so often.
“We back again, y’all,” the homeowner, 28-year-old Antwon Vincent, a rapper who performs under the name Noochie, announced to a crowd of about 10 one frigid December night. “Rain, sleet or snow. Whether it’s hot or it’s cold.”
Then he introduced that evening’s featured performer to the stage — er, porch. Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Eric Roberson walked through the front door, shook Noochie’s hand and started crooning a slow-jam love song into a mic as if he were appearing on a late-night talk show with a studio audience.
Welcome to Noochie’s “Live From the Front Porch,” the D.C.-centric, residential equivalent of NPR’s “Tiny Desk” concert series. It has featured big-name acts like Raheem DeVaughn and Ruben Studdard and attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers on YouTube and Instagram.
“Live From the Front Porch” originated about five years ago, when Noochie, who had been signed to Atlantic Records, was in the process of leaving his contract. Since he was in limbo with his record label, he didn’t want to release any official music, not knowing where ownership rights would lie. Instead he grabbed his iPhone and a portable speaker and started recording himself freestyling over industry beats from his front porch. Then he shared the results on Instagram.
“I was like, let me do something that has no attachment to anything and let me just rap it. I’m not going to monetize from this, but it’ll just show people that I’m skilled and give people a visual, too,” the “Sneaky Tape 2” artist says. “It was completely out of hunger.”
Noochie kept up the performances through the pandemic, and in March 2023, his friend Tyler Benson offered to help him increase the series’s production value. Benson replaced the rapper’s iPhone with a professional camera, which gave the duo an opportunity to do multiple takes and edit as needed. Benson’s changes also meant Noochie could capture more of his front porch, so he had an idea: “Let me put a whole band on the porch.” He swapped his portable speaker for live instrumentals.
Expanding “Live From the Front Porch” to “Live From the Front Porch Presents” happened almost by accident.
“There was no goal to put other people on it,” Noochie says, chuckling. “This started because other people weren’t putting me on stuff. People weren’t calling me. … People that I wanted to work with weren’t working with me. So I was like, ‘You know what, let me just go to square one with my own people, at my house, with my skills that I know how to do.’ I mixed all the audio myself.”
Noochie had always dreamed of having go-go legends the Backyard Band perform for his birthday, so in July he made the invite, set up the porch and decided to record the session. “Instead of being selfish,” he remembers thinking, “I can give it to everybody.”
In the nine months since, the Front Porch sessions have animated the D.C. music scene, as followers try to track down the exact location of the house and speculate on the timing of the next concert.
But Noochie wants the events to be in service of the musicians as much as the fans.
That’s what Don Choo, a longtime family friend who used to work with Noochie’s father, D.C. hip-hop trailblazer Oneway Boobe (real name Roger Vincent), says is the real appeal of “Live From the Front Porch.” It gives artists an opportunity to home in on what they love most — the music.
“Some of the best jam sessions have happened here because there’s no ‘Lights, camera, action’ with thousands of people. This is just the artist vibing out. You get better music that way because it’s a performance that comes from the heart, it’s not to wow an audience,” Choo said on the night of the Eric Roberson concert. “Like there’s nobody here, there’s no audience, it’s just us.”
That feeling means a lot to Noochie — it’s the essence of what he’s trying to preserve and promote. The tidy, brick-faced single-family home used to belong to his father. It was here that he watched his father push through his own challenges as a musician.
“I grew up in the era of him pursuing hip-hop in a city that was really only accepting of go-go,” Noochie says. “It was kind of like I already got to experience seeing an uphill battle firsthand.”
The rapper inherited this house just a year before his father was incarcerated in 2018.
“My dad, he was the reason I started. He’s incarcerated right now, and this was his house. He tried to sell it, but I fought for it to make sure it didn’t go nowhere, and fast-forward, here we are, and it brought a whole other meaning to what this house has meant already,” Noochie says. “This used to be the studio; like Shy Glizzy got his start here, Fat Trel has been here, there’s a lot of history here.”
Noochie, who will perform this weekend at the National Cannabis Festival, sees “Live From the Front Porch” as a way of continuing his father’s legacy — and carving out his own.
“He was a nucleus to all these people, so I’m just keeping it going; that’s how I look at it,” he says. “It’s a different group of individuals, but the spirit of it is the same. Just making sure that we all chasing the dream and we all get closer to it together.”