Robby Ameen brings concert film, live drums and Q&A to Martha's Vineyard

Robby Ameen’s 20-minute film opened the night at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center, then the drummer came onstage with friends for a live set and a discussion with director Nelson Hume. At the 14th annual FILMUSIC Festival, that two-part format made the evening feel less like a screening and more like a direct look at how Ameen works, hears and drives a band.

For drummers, Ameen is the kind of player whose résumé tells only part of the story. Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts identifies him as a Grammy® Award-winning drummer who has lived in New York City since the early 1980s, with a recording career that stretches from Dizzy Gillespie to Paul Simon. He is also closely associated with Ruben Blades and with Kip Hanrahan’s band alongside Jack Bruce, a line that places him squarely in jazz, Afro-Cuban music and the broader world of artist-driven collaboration.

The film carried the title Robby Ameen Live at the Poster Museum, and the music behind it had already reached listeners as a 2024 release on Origin Records. That album credits Ameen with Edsel Gomez on electric piano, Lincoln Goines on acoustic bass, Bob Franceschini on saxophones, Troy Roberts on tenor saxophone and Conrad Herwig on trombone. The project itself grew out of the COVID shutdown and was staged in Tribeca’s Philip Williams Poster Shop, a setting that gave the music a tight, room-level immediacy even before the Vineyard audience saw it on screen. Reviews published in 2025 described Ameen’s playing there as forceful and in command of the music.

The Martha’s Vineyard date also fit the shape of Ameen’s own life. He and his wife usually come to the Island to relax, and he keeps a full drum kit in a shed that doubles as a simple, unheated studio for practicing and recording. Long before that, he built homemade drums from empty cracker canisters and scavenged inner tubes, and he still remembers practicing six or seven hours a day as a child. Those details made the appearance feel less like a travel stop and more like a rare public opening into a private routine.

Tickets for the FILMUSIC event were set at $15 for general admission, $12 for members and $10 for children 14 or younger, with doors opening 30 minutes before the screening. For a drummer whose work has travelled from major jazz stages to a shed on Martha’s Vineyard, the sequence of film first, live drums second, was the point: it put the craft, the history and the sound in the same room.