UPTOWNflavor

On the middle floor of a Harlem brownstone that once was home to Langston Hughes, the pianist Marc Cary holes up in a studio crowded with computers, keyboards, partly depleted bottles of red wine, and other flotsam of the creative process.

In the next room, his collaborator in business and music , Shon “Chance” Miller, a hip-hop artist and producer, lurks in similar fashion. Motema Music, the indie label on which Cary records, has its office in a space upstairs. And on the parlor floor, in the one fully renovated room, a concert piano stands proudly beneath a bank of stage lights.

Folks trundle up and down the narrow staircase and maneuver past drywall and over ripped-up carpet. Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, may have lived here, but the house is no elegant Harlem dowager. When the artists leased the building last year, they found it in a state unbecoming to the memory of its illustrious resident.

“It was in such disrepair and disrespect,” Cary says. Now, he says, they’re bringing the energy back, and he is starting to feel the presence of the luminaries who once met here. “Sometimes when you sit here — quietly — you can see something out of the corner of your eye. There’s a certain joy in here that’s come back to life.”

At once idiosyncratic and in the tradition, the vibe in the house aptly encapsulates the spirit of Cary’s music, an eclectic portfolio that is grounded in jazz but overflows into hip-hop, soul, house, Indian music, spoken poetry, and much else depending on which of his various projects and musical accomplices he’s dealing with.

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