From gentrification came inspiration tinged with more than a touch of melancholy.
Musician Freddie Bryant returns to his old Manhattan neighborhood for “Upper West Side Love Story,” an ambitious two-CD song cycle mixing nostalgia with the cold hard truth about the local landscape’s changing fortunes through the decades.
These were the streets of the 58-year-old Bryant’s youth and adulthood, until soaring rents and sweeping new development sent the guitarist/composer/lyricist to the Bronx four years ago.
“A bunch of the songs are love songs, and if you listen closely it’s about the neighborhood,” he said in one of the many local coffee shops that opened as the old Upper West Side morphed into something new.
“When I was here, it was my neighborhood,” said Bryant, sitting a short walk from his old playground. “But there’s always a neighborhood. It’s just a different kind of neighborhood.”
As one of Bryant’s new lyrics puts it, “Mom and Pop have left the shop, replaced by another cafe.”
The twin threads of music and memories intertwined in 2019 when the talented jazz musician received a 2019 grant from Chamber Music America to create what became the expansive 92-minute album getting released Friday.
Good news, but it was preceded by a three-year battle with an investor landlord over the W. 87th St. apartment building where his family resided for five decades.
When they were finally forced out after a series of increasingly expensive and fruitless court hearings, their apartment sold for a staggering $2.3 million, Bryant said.
Luckily, the musician’s distress provoked a bolt of inspirational lightning.
“There’s always some kind of message or meaning to me when I write,” he said. “And so it really made sense that this [neighborhood] was the biggest part of my life, really, besides babies and marriage, you know? It made sense.”
The seeds for the 16-song work for a chamber-jazz ensemble, with music, lyrics and haikus by Bryant, were…
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