Together with his wife Sarah Freidman, Aaron Neville, legend of New Orleans and the funk/R&B stage, recently sold this Greenwich Village penthouse. The duplex, located on 9th street, changed owners for $2.61 million.
Neville and Friedman, who is a professional photographer, purchased the home in 2012 for $1.44 million. The home, located at Randall House, features two bedrooms, and two baths with floors warmed by radiant-heat. The style is quite plain, with bright rooms, smallish windows, a transitional kitchen with lots of workspace, hardwood flooring, and long, clean contemporary lines—much as one would expect from a residential building dating to 1955. The penthouse’s 400 square foot terrace, with irrigated and landscaped gardens, offers a little room to expand in warmer weather.
Born third of the four Neville brothers, Aaron’s fluid, soulful falsetto was a key ingredient of the Neville Brothers’ sound, an amalgam of hard Crescent City funk and jazz vocalist styles. He had been a solo musician for about ten years when the Neville Brothers formed. Using his New Orleans heritage of blues, calypso, jazz, funk, soul and Acadian musical influences as a springboard, he developed his own style of jazz-inflected R&B which became the prototype for the genre as we know it today.
Sarah Friedman is a commercial and celebrity photographer based in New York. She met Neville in 2008, after People magazine hired her to a photograph the brothers, and the couple was married in 2010.
