The Band Concurrence Shows How Music Can Transcend Destruction
On the Harbor Stage at the 2026 Newport Jazz Festival on July 31, bassist Greg Bryant and pianist Paul Horton of Concurrence were playing their way through the history of North Nashville: the clubs and communities that once surrounded Jefferson Street, the construction of Interstate 40 through them and the musical possibilities that disappeared with the physical places that had sustained them. The pair were showing that what is gone can still have life in music.
Halfway through the duo’s Newport Jazz Festival debut set, Bryant asked the audience to consider where they were standing. Fort Adams had served as a summer White House during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, which meant that 70 years after Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a Black bassist from Nashville was standing on grounds associated with his presidency, performing music about what happened when the interstate system reached North Nashville. The historical symmetry is almost indecently tidy. The actual history was not. There was another chronology folded into the coincidence: the Newport Jazz Festival had already begun. George Wein established the festival in 1954, two years before Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act and several years before the federal government approved Nashville’s proposed I-40 route through North Nashville. Jazz was becoming institutionally important enough to gather around, present and preserve at Newport while, during the same historical period, the physical geography supporting Black musical life elsewhere could still be treated as expendable.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore: America was learning how to commemorate Black music while remaining perfectly capable of building through the places that made it. Eisenhower did not personally draw I-40 through Jefferson Street, and blaming one presidential signature would obscure the state and local decisions that determined where Nashville’s concrete actually went. Federal legislation enabled a national interstate system; planners chose its local path through a city already structured by segregation and unequal political power.
In North Nashville, that path cut through a Black commercial, residential, educational and cultural district generations had built around institutions including Fisk University, Tennessee State University and Meharry Medical College. And at 2417 Jefferson Street, The Del Morocco opened in 1935 under Theodore “Uncle Teddy” Acklen and operated for more than three decades. Students from Fisk, Tennessee State and Meharry were among its patrons; Jimi Hendrix and Billy Cox passed through with the King Kasuals. People came to drink, dance, socialize, hear bands and participate in the ordinary nighttime life through which a musical culture becomes a musical culture.
Acklen’s son later described the Jefferson Street interstate exit as running through the place where the Del Morocco’s front door once stood, a detail that changes the scale of the history. The New Era Club survived differently. William “Soo” Bridgeforth opened it in 1939 and eventually operated at 11th and Charlotte, where Etta James recorded Etta James Rocks the House over two nights in September 1963. Interstate construction displaced that location too, and Bridgeforth moved the club again. That intersection carried an uncomfortable familiarity for me. I had lived in Nashville for years and worked in talent booking, moving through that part of the city without knowing Etta James had recorded a live album there, but that personal ignorance turned out to be considerably less interesting than the system capable of producing it.
“The people in Nashville didn’t even know,” Bryant told me later, describing what he encountered while researching Concurrence’s 2024 release Indivisible: musicians who knew little about what had happened and others who carried pieces of the history without understanding its scale.
Here the story becomes more uncomfortable: Nashville, in fact, is exceptionally good at remembering music. The city’s cultural identity and a substantial part of its tourism economy depend upon the proposition that musical geography matters: rooms, studios, stages and addresses can acquire significance because somebody recorded something there, played something there, wrote something there or stood behind a microphone there decades ago. Nashville does not need to be convinced that something cool happening at some random spot can make a place sacred. Or historic. Or anything really. The question is of the places allowed to remain unavoidable.
Jefferson Street was not vacant land awaiting useful infrastructure. It belonged to someone. A larger Black commercial, educational, residential and cultural district shaped partly by the restrictions segregation imposed on where Black Nashvillians could live, shop, study, socialize and hear music. Businesses, churches, homes and clubs grew there because people built a community within — and despite — the boundaries imposed around them. When I-40 was constructed through North Nashville, more than 600 homes, 27 apartment buildings and six churches were demolished; streets were severed and residents separated from businesses, schools and one another.
Nashville’s own public-health work has since acknowledged the lasting institutional harm highway construction caused the city’s African American community. The highway did not go through nothing; it went through something people had spent generations building. Once Bryant and Horton understood more fully what had occupied that geography, Indivisible began reaching beyond what an archive could recover. They started asking a stranger question: what would these places sound like if they had continued?
“I tried to put myself in the place of the band playing, [and] the patrons,” one of them told me when we sat down behind the meeting tent after the Newport set. An archive can establish that the Del Morocco stood at 2417 Jefferson Street; it can preserve photographs and advertisements, recover names, document ownership and tell us who played there. But an archive cannot tell Paul Horton what the band would be playing at the Del Morocco tonight. There is no tonight there. Concurrence composes directly and entirely into that absence.
“Groovin at the Del Morocco” moves into “Last Call at the New Era,” and then, just when the listener has settled in, the highway gets built. You can hear the plan as day, dear reader: the sequence matters because Bryant and Horton build the clubs audibly before destroying them compositionally, first letting us enter the rooms and enjoy the melodic ease of a place functioning as a place, people gathering, the band playing, the night underway. The Del Morocco gets to groove; the New Era gets a last call. Suddenly, “I-40 Was a Razor” changes the physical character of the music. The arrangement grows denser and more confrontational; percussion builds pressure, cymbals crash through the musical field and rhythmic figures continue pushing forward as sounds accumulate and collide.
By then Concurrence has established a social world around the Del Morocco and New Era, giving the composition something to interrupt — and the listener something to lose. The title is brutally precise: a razor need not destroy everything around it to cause damage; its function is separation, cutting through something that had previously been connected. That was what made Bryant’s request at Newport — to consider where we were standing — more than a clever piece of stage banter.
Newport is exceptionally conscious of its own ground. Jazz history accumulates everywhere at Fort Adams through artists, debuts, anniversaries, stages, stories and generations returning to a place where previous generations played. Horton mentioned during our conversation that Charles Lloyd had made his Newport debut as a leader 60 years earlier, precisely the kind of continuity central to Newport’s cultural power: an artist plays here, people remember, another generation arrives, and the history remains attached to the ground.
Nashville understands the principle perfectly well. The South is famously invested in memory, inheritance, tradition, preservation and the authority of the past; Black musical history deserves that same reverence. Historians, musicians, residents and institutions have spent decades documenting Nashville’s Black music history, and that work continues. The criticism is not that nobody remembered Jefferson Street — plenty of people did — but that Nashville already understands the cultural, civic and economic power of making musical history impossible to miss. Imagine Jefferson Street receiving that same sustained civic imagination: not simply a marker explaining what disappeared, but investment, programming and stages where another generation could encounter Black Nashville’s musical history as part of the city’s living culture. Forgetting is not always the absence of information. Put information beneath concrete long enough and eventually ignorance begins to look like inevitability. Indivisible listens in the other direction and, fantastically, composes into the silence.
“If I did it right, then people would know a lot more about what went down in North Nashville than people knew,” Bryant said. He was talking about playing bass: composition through bass notes, through an instrument whose very job is so often to ground everything happening around it. For Horton, that movement through time comes partly through the blues, which he described not as a historical artifact but as a musical language capable of communicating backward and forward at once.
“If you can tap into the blues, then you’re making music that’s gonna connect with everybody,” Horton said.
He continued: “It reaches back and communicates something that you’re not familiar with because it’s reaching so far back in time, but it’s also sending and communicating with the future in a very weird way that you can’t really put into words.”
The past and future do not remain neatly separated in music: when a musical room disappears, we lose what happened there; when a community is interrupted along with it, we also lose what would have happened next.
Collaborations of musicians who never met there, sounds that never developed inside that particular room, audiences that never gathered again. Traditions that never had the opportunity to mutate, misbehave, age, modernize, reject themselves or begin again.
How many other American musical futures were interrupted this way, and what are we still not hearing because the rooms, neighborhoods and relationships necessary to produce them were dismantled before their possibilities could become sound?
And yet here was Concurrence at Newport Jazz festival 2026, playing toward them. In conversation, the group told me that listeners approached them, including people who had not known the history beneath Indivisible. One woman, they recalled, learned what the album concerned and told them she could not get it out of her mind.
“That’s mission accomplished, I guess.” Bryant said.
Near the end of our conversation, the two presented the idea at the center of the project.
“Music, [as a] living organism, it is a living memorial to those places, to those ancestors who were there,” they explained. “We don’t need, you know, [a] … placard in the ground — that’s not what this is — this is [music] a static situation.”
Horton continues: “This is a song that we have [now], a living memorial.”
A living memorial. The phrase continues the history with music. Indivisible is not a substitute for justice in any sense, justifying the poetry maybe but that’s for later. Poetic justice is sweet and slow and awful. Music cannot return property. It definitely cannot change an interstate highway.
What music can do is refuse that destruction equates to silence. A monument asks us to look at what survived. Indivisible asks us to listen to what did not. And “what did not” includes more than the Del Morocco and New Era; it includes their unrealized living rooms, a child’s tomorrows. The concrete of a highway begins to look inevitable with time; while the homes, businesses, churches, stages, front doors and ordinary evenings that preceded it become harder to imagine. Bryant and Horton refuse that. The north Nashville imagery and composition move the audience from an address into a world building composition of musical brilliance and storytelling.
In fact, this audible expression of North Nashville traveled hundreds of miles to Newport, Rhode Island. A historic moment — and iconic festival — audiences gathered on loaded soil to consider the ground beneath its own feet. And suddenly 2417 Jefferson Street has a tonight.
The future becomes audible beside a past it was never allowed to have. For the length of Indivisible, 70 years into the future, Concurrence puts the address back on the marquee.
In fact, band’s playing. Come on in.