Things couldn’t be going much better for The Seed.

Two years in a row, the band was voted best local band in The Roanoke Times’ annual music poll. Singer Gabe “The Ambassador” Lewis won best male vocalist in the 2007 poll. Drummer/guitarist Brent Hoskins was voted best musician in City Magazine’s 2008 poll. The band has a strong following for its fine live mix of reggae, ska and Latin grooves.

It just finished a CD that includes such guest artists as guitarist Sol Creech, multi-instrumentalist Tim Smith (Tim Smith Band, Squirrel Nut Zippers) and members of the Alliens . A CD release party is set for Friday  at 202 Market.

Only one thing makes sense now: move out of town.

The Seed’s core — Lewis, 27, Hoskins, 29, and bassist Jay DeCicco, 25 — will head for Washington, D.C., the first week of July.

“We want to be around more musicians to push us and inspire us,” Lewis said. “We know we’re not going to make it with what we’ve got now, so we want to try something new.”

This is a band that has stuck together through intercontinental distances and the difficulties of keeping a bass player. A simple move north shouldn’t throw these guys too much. As Hoskins and Lewis passed their mid-20s, they decided it was time to get serious.

“This has been good,” Lewis, 27, said of coming up in Roanoke. “It was a good place to sprout.”

The next stop could well see the band in full bloom, said Jake Dempsey, who produced, mixed and engineered the new record at his studio, the Red Room.

“I think there are good things on the horizon for those guys,” Dempsey said. “Their music is very strong and accessible. D.C. has a great reggae community, so they’ve got that going for them. … They are great, positive people; they work hard, and the band is awesome. I think that if they stay at it and keep their business senses about them, they’ll be touring full time in a few years.”

Planting The Seed

Percussionist John “Slothman” Spence, 29, is the reason Hoskins and Lewis came together. Spence and Hoskins met and became musical partners when they were students at Northside High School. When Spence transferred to William Fleming High School, he met Lewis, and wound up introducing the two.

“Before we knew it, we were writing songs and jamming on four -tracks,” Hoskins said. “This was our first real band.”

They parted ways for a while, with Hoskins heading to Florida to learn audio engineering at Full Sail University. Lewis went to Roanoke College, and wound up teaching English in Korea.

Hoskins came back to Roanoke after squeezing Full Sail’s two-year program into one.  The pair kept mailing each other four -track tapes, making beats and writing songs. They ran up phone bills playing ideas for each other — “the magical speaker phone,” Lewis called  it.

“Next thing you know, we had CDs and tapes full of ideas,” Hoskins said. “We said, 'Why don’t we try this’ ” as a career.

In 2004, Lewis returned from Korea. By fall 2005, he and Hoskins had a band name and were building an audience.

But The Seed couldn’t keep a bass player. Even DeCicco moved to Philadelphia for a while, joining his family in a restaurant business last year. But the experience “sucked,” he said. It was time to come back to The Seed.

By then, the band had cut its CD. Lewis and Hoskins wrote all the songs, but they say the self-titled CD is “Jake’s baby, too.”

“He listened to our ideas and helped us make those happen,” Lewis said. “But he also had great ideas of his own that we hadn’t thought of.”

In DeCicco’s absence, Dempsey wound up playing bass on about half the tracks.

“It was a real pleasure working on it, because the material just stands on its own,” Dempsey said via e-mail. “It’s full of these great hooks that really stick with you.

“It’s reggae, but it has a real pop sensibility. That made my job easy. Their music actually has a message, too. That’s kind of a rare thing now.”

Long nights in the studio passed easily with The Seed, who knew what they wanted musically and who know how to play their instruments, Dempsey said.

“Gabe and Brent are two of the funniest guys I have ever met. They never stop. They would come in the studio and cut up for nine hours straight. They had me rolling every night.”

Bringing on the funk, soul

March 14 at Martin’s Downtown Bar and Grill. The Seed is onstage . Spence and Hoskins are percolating on a stock reggae groove while DeCicco pumps tightly articulated bass lines. Lewis pops and scratches his guitar strings with his thumb and fingernails, nailing the beat on two and four and hitting with bluesy guitar solos.

Lewis begins singing Beres Hammond’s “They Gonna Talk.” The band learned that song from an eight -track tape, Hoskins says later.

A crowd slowly builds in front of the Martin’s stage as the band slides from the reggae beat into a hard samba groove. You’ll hear a lot of Latin and Afro-Cuban passages at a Seed show, and a fair amount of soul, too.

You might think of the band as a reggae outfit with dancehall  and rocksteady  splashes, and there’s plenty of that. But it’s often a jumping-off point for more stylistic influences. Funk, hip-hop and blue-eyed soul are all part of the mix. One of the new disc’s strongest tunes, “Frontin,’ ” sounds like it would be at home on R&B radio.

And Lewis’ voice is an adaptable instrument, a good vehicle for his lyrics.

“Put a smile on your face and don’t forget your dancing shoes/Let’s step out and spread some joy, true love can’t lose/Well, they can act hard (so hard)/And wear a big frown/But now that we’re here, we’re gonna turn this party upside down,” he sings in “Steppin’ Up.”
It’s not long before the stage-front floor is packed with people bobbing and swaying. The band is tireless. For a young group, it’s a slice of life that you want to hold on to, one of those nights when you feel like you own something. One of those nights that would keep lesser souls at home, on the same stages, trying to hold on to that same feeling.

Not so for The Seed.

“We’ve been in Roanoke most of our lives,” Hoskins said during a break between sets. “New faces, new places. It’s time to try something new, you know.”