Vendor Writing

Poetry Issue

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We’ve highlighted our favorite Contributor vendor poems from the last year accompanied by custom illustrations by Melissa Willis.

Features

2417 Jefferson Street Open Again

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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.

Vendor Writing

Rita

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A couple of months after I became homeless, I befriended a guy who had just gotten out of jail. We were around the same age and had similar “complicated” backgrounds.