NEW YORK - ‘S ee, that’s Fort Greene right there, the projects, and I went to school right here — this is George Westinghouse,” says Jay-Z, looking through the window of his gray Rolls-Royce as it chauffeurs him into his past. “Marcy Projects is about five minutes straight down,” he says, pointing toward the housing development where he once lived.

“See that? That’s one thing I liked about going to school here,” he adds with a smile, indicating a road sign that reads “Jay St.” Jay-Z, 37, doesn’t return often to the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up as Shawn Corey Carter. Stardom and wealth have taken him away to a Manhattan home and the globe-trotting life of a hip-hop star and record executive.

It’s his role as a recording artist that has brought him back on a warm fall day, to rehearse for a taping of “VH1 Storytellers” on a soundstage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. As the car inches past the courts where he used to play basketball and the corners where he once sold drugs, he finds that his emotions are stirred. “Yeah, man, it’s the place that made me,” he says softly. As it happens, Jay-Z’s homecoming parallels the artistic journey he made on his new No.

1 album, “American Gangster,” inspired by the Denzel Washington movie of the same name. “It connected with me on an emotional level,” said the rapper, who completed the collection in a typically fast three weeks. “It was so similar to the neighborhoods that I came up in, and things that happened there. And Denzel’s character, as well … you know, his laid-back persona, that’s pretty much how I am. “It’s really about the emotions of that life.