Al and Jess have music in their veins. Jess was brought up in London by musician parents. Her father wrote his first album, “One for the Road,” a British Folk music classic, when he was 17 Her step father was a saxophonist at the British Royal Academy. “I was always around music,” said Jess. Al began playing the saxophone at around 18. A practical lad, he also served the London Fire Brigade for 30 years.
The couple met in 2014 when Jess was a chef at Books for Cooks, a cookery bookshop on Portobello Road in London. She was baking bread when Al came in with his two golden retrievers, Bill and Ben.
They immediately hit it off. They played music together, and before long embarked on a dramatic change when they purchased a river boat and departed on what turned out to be a many-year tour of English rivers and canals.
In 2020, as England shut down due to COVID, the couple attempted to continue their business. They rented a farmer’s field near their boat, served take away pizza, and played music. Their little enclave of music and pizza gave their guests “a sense of normality,” recalled Al.
“It was a musical food affair”
The lockdowns added an incentive for the family to leave England and see the world. In April 2021, they departed for Central America “looking for a life.”
It took them almost a year to find that. Al, Jess, and their little daughter first arrived in Costa Rica, but they didn’t quite find what they were looking for there. “It felt like it didn’t know what it was,” Al recalled about Costa Rica. “It felt disjointed.”
The couple also missed the sense of community. After 10 months in Costa Rica, the couple bought an old Toyota 4 Runner and headed for Roatan.
Here, Al found exactly what he was looking for. “Roatan felt more like a community, more of a multicultural place. There were American, Irish, Bulgarians and Poles here. (…) It seemed to me what the Caribbean was in 1970s. It had that vibe,” said Al. “When I think of Caribbean Islands, I think of Barbados. Here, it seemed more gritty.”
In January 2022, the couple began playing music at bars and restaurants in West End, Sandy Bay, and West Bay. While Al and Jess mostly play covers of singers like Shade, Amy Winehouse, and Stevie Wonder, they also write their own songs.
The lyrics to their original songs are about what the couple feels most passionate about: their four-year-old daughter, and living on Roatan.
Jess composes the music and writes the lyrics, and Al arranges the songs on the couple’s recording studio in their home in Sandy Bay.
(Click here to read the full article from Berkshire life magazine “Fresh off the boat”, page 64.)
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