In 1968, Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes took the unprecedented action of asking the Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop the construction of the so-called Clark Freeway. It was estimated that construction of the highway to connect I-271 with I-490 would sever existing neighborhoods and displace 20,000 Clevelanders, many of them Black residents of the East Side.
Stokes succeeded and the Clark Freeway was never built, but other cities were not so lucky. One of them was Nashville, where the construction of I-40 and the devastation it caused in the city’s Black neighborhoods became the inspiration for, Indivisible, a stirring musical presentation by the duo project Concurrence that will play at BOP STOP Sunday joined by Cleveland drummer Aaron Smith.
Concurrence is the longtime collaboration of two Nashvillians, bassist and WRTI radio and podcast host Greg Bryant and Paul Horton, who is a touring member of Alabama Shakes. The two met in college in 2000, long after I-40 cut through Jefferson St. in the heart of Black Nashville. Still, Bryant said in a video call, “We were among the last musicians to play Jefferson Street, that nerve center, before it completely gentrified.”
Listening to the 22 tracks of Indivisible, released in June by Brooklyn indie label La Reserve, you can almost feel the pulsing energy of the clubs, BBQ joints and bars that once made Jefferson St. a hub of Nashville nightlife.
You can hear it in the bounce of “Groovin at the Del Morroco,” and the head-nodding flow of “Night Cap At Brown’s Dinner Club.” Having established what was at stake, Bryant and Horton call the class to order, delivering a history lesson with the hip-hop-influenced “A Study In Resistance” and “We Get Back Up,” both of which use loops and samples to tell the somber story of the community’s displacement and ultimately, dispersal.
That story hits close to home for Bryant. “My mother lived on a street right off Jefferson St. as a young child. Three doors down from her was Z Alexander Looby, the prominent civil rights attorney of that day alongside Thurgood Marshall. His house was bombed; he was luckily not home.” Bryant’s mother was.
“She literally felt the covers fly off of her body just from the vibration of the bomb. They didn’t know what was happening at the time, but later on, they certainly knew what had happened,” Bryant said. “When the interstate came through Jefferson, her family was forced to relocate [and] that’s a missed opportunity for wealth accumulation.”
Like Chris Coles’ “Nine Lives Suite,” the subject of a recent episode of “The Late Set,” the podcast Bryant hosts with Nate Chinen, Indivisible is history in music, and that history contains a message.
“What happens if someone like Jimi Hendrix, who matriculated in Nashville, before he joined Little Richard, before he joined the Isley Brothers, what happens if he could have stayed in Nashville, built his career and made a name for himself?
“What happens if [saxophonist] Hank Crawford stayed in Nashville and did not join Ray Charles’ band? Could he have become a major star in the southern United States or nationally, launching out from [Nashville]? We’ll never know.”
Bryant’s Instagram handle is @gb_watchman, and watchfulness, wary but informed, is a subtext of Indivisible, a subtle but unmistakable call to keep one’s eyes open as well as on the prize.
“As we tell some of the story through our banter and if someone decides to really investigate the album, I hope it would shed light on whatever hidden histories may be happening in Cleveland,” Bryant said.