Fourth Visitors

Bill, Brent, Jennifer, Michael, Toni at Heartland Brewery Midtown

Wednesday we got to see another familiar face. Our good friend, Brent Searing, was here to see Jeff Beck perform at the Iridium Jazz Club (more on that later). Brent is from Kansas City but he has been living in Washington DC for the last ten years or so. He has been with the US Marines a number of years and it has turned out to be a career for him. He was a jet pilot and had actually left the Marines and had secured a job as a commercial airline pilot. He was scheduled to start the middle of September 2001. After the attacks on the 11th the airline cut him before he even started and in turn he went back to the Marines. He has been working in various capacities at the Pentagon since then. His current job is to facilitate identification and recovery of soldiers’ remains from past wars. As Casualty Liaison Officer, this has taken him to Eastern Europe and Japan many times and he has helped many families find answers to decades old questions.


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He is also a big music fan and in particular an avid fan of Jeff Beck. So much so that in the late nineties he managed to meet him a couple of times and they hit it off. Since then they have become good friends and Brent is able to spend time with his hero before and after concerts.
We met up at a brewpub a couple of blocks away from our apartment. He introduced us his friend, Jennifer Batten, and her friend, Michael. The two of them had come in from Portland, Oregon to join Brent in DC for Beck’s show there. Jennifer is also a professional guitarist and she played on a couple of Jeff Beck albums and tours and also played with Michael Jackson on three tours and his Super Bowl appearance.

Brent has invited us to DC and promised us a grand tour of the city including a behind the scenes tour of the Pentagon. It is only a three hour train ride so we will probably take him up on that after the summer.

Here is a video of Jennifer playing with Jeff Beck playing a Jan Hammer tune: