The band plays a primetime, 5 p.m. set on Saturday, day two of the festival. Michigan songwriter Jenn Marsh and storied New Orleans outfit Rebirth Brass Band will be on other stages at the same time, but the set is actually the first live gig that indie-rock band Whataboutmomma ever booked.
GMF, for its part, is making its debut at downtown Tampa’s Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park after spending the last 12 years executing the blueprint for how music festivals should be staged at Curtis Hixon and Kiley Garden, less than half-a-mile south on the Hillsborough River.
Still, both the band and festival have the tools to tackle the task at hand.
Whataboutmomma (stylized in all-lowercase) is built around three friends—Jalen Lattimore, Donnell Alexander and Stephen Michael Stewart—who graduated from Blake High School just one block away from Julian B. Lane. They met in a classroom run by Carmen Griffin, Blake’s Director of Jazz Studies.
Lattimore, 24, and Alexander, 26, both went to Berklee School of Music on scholarship where they studied sound design, music performance, music production and songwriting. Stewart, 24, went to Florida A&M University where he studied jazz performance.
Circumstances led them all back to their born-and-raised homes where Gilchrist and Stewart’s jazz and R&B combo already had history gigging at local venues.
Whataboutmomma’s roots in music reach back even further.
Lattimore’s family is like Osmonds or Jacksons in its musicality. His father was in a military band; his late grandfather, Carlton Lattimore Sr., was in “The President's Own” United States Marine Band and had an aunt who sang at Carnegie Hall. Grandpa also played organ in The Starliters, a ‘60s group that backed Joey Dee. In January 1962, Dee and the Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist” knocked Chubby Checker off the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 and spent three weeks in the no. 1 spot.
“It’s funny, over Christmas, we’re all just playing instruments and singing harmonies,” Lattimore told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay about family get togethers.
Photo by Dave Decker
Whataboutmomma
He and his sister both play instruments, and he started taking piano lessons at the age of three before picking up trumpet in fourth grade. The instrument got him into Blake, and he auditioned with it to get into Berklee. For Whataboutmomma, Lattimore is on vocals and guitar, instruments he started to learn as part of his songwriting track at the storied Boston music school.
Alexander’s dad was a DJ, but he doesn’t consider himself someone who comes from a musical background. As a kid, he fell in love with composition while using a Fisher Price keyboard that was a gift from mom, who played violin in middle school.
“It was a toy, but I was literally composing songs there, and she noticed that I just had that natural inclination for it,” he said.
So he was in lessons by six years old. Like a lot of middle schoolers obsessed with “Adult Swim” (Cartoon Network programming that featured cutting edge music in the bump segments), Alexander fell into beat production.
“I used to wonder, ‘Who's producing these?,’ and that's how I got put on to Flying Lotus and the whole SoundCloud era and artists like Mr. Carmack and Kaytranada,” Alexander explained.
Photo by Dave Decker
Jalen Lattimore of Whataboutmomma, which plays Gasparilla Music Festival in Tampa, Florida on Feb. 17, 2024.
The mandatory dance with home PC production studio FruityLoops followed, but dad noticed the gift and bought him Pro Tools in seventh grade.
“I was getting theory and musical knowledge from piano but then listening to Gucci Mane and Lil Wayne to pick up production,” he said. At Blake, more piano class got his chops up, and he sharpened them even more of it at Berklee.
Stewart is deeply into lo-fi hip-hop producer Knxwledge, Pete Rock, underground East coast rap icon Westside Gunn; he even speaks the language of more contemporary emcees from Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt to Billboard poster boy Drake. Stewart studies Berklee alum and fellow drummer Justin Tyson, plus new school jazz giant Thundercat.
“And don’t get us started on Stephen’s jazz background. He will out converse us there on any day,” Lattimore added.
Photo by Dave Decker
The band's influences include those ‘60s sounds, hip-hop, and jazz, but there’s also a lot of pop music in the mix (Now That’s What I Call Music CDs were a commodity), plus gospel for church, Brazilian hitmaker Sergio Mendes, late Clearwater-based jazz great Chick Corea, Chicago, Queen and The Police.
Whataboutmomma’s songs (the band has about 20 demos)—wear all of those influences, and Alexander’s favorite thing about the band is how the core members all share that same, eclectic, musical upbringing. It’s not common to find a band where all of its members were listening to Return To Forever at age five, after all.
AJ Denhoff, who studied upright bass at Blake and started the schools composers collective club, will help Whataboutmomma pull off the music, which is indie to core, with touches of the guys’ upbringing.
“You’ll get some pop, some folk, hip-hop, even trap. It’s not mainstream at all, but it’s not what you’d typically hear,” Alexander said before Lattimore added, “And not typical indie.”
Whataboutmomma’s arrival at GMF is not typical either. Lattimore had no plans to play the festival. But he is an intern for the nonprofit, and one of the talent buyers, longtime Tampa promoter Julia Stewart, invited him to play after hearing a demo. He was hesitant. There was no way the band was ready to play. But she asked Alexander to play a few week’s later and he immediately said, “Yes.”
“Thank god he was there,” Lattimore said, laughing. “He lit a fire under my butt. It was inspiring. He had that dog in him. And Julia had that dog in here to let us do it. I was the only one without a dog.”
So for the last four months, Whataboutmomma has been practicing twice a week to get ready for the show. The band even snuck in a warm up gig at GMF’s VIP Soundcheck party in Ybor City last week (see photos from the gig below).
After the festival debut, Whataboutmomma will work on its album, for which it already has nine songs ready. And if the project takes off, the boys won’t forget where they came from—a sentiment baked right into the band’s very name.
“‘What about mama,’” Alexander explained, is a reminder that it’s your mom that births you. It's kind of like, ‘That's where you came from.’ But it’s also your influences, the experiences in your life, those things that just birth you as a person—we’re saying, ‘Don't forget those things.’”
Full disclosure: This writer assisted GMF with social media between March 2013-August 2016.
