Text & Video: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photos: Francisco Collazo
There was a moment last year when I realized–suddenly–that subway music pisses me off.
I was making my way through the masses of people waiting to catch the N train when I heard drum sticks beating on an overturned plastic bucket. An irrational annoyance flooded me that hasn’t really left since.
Almost 10 years in New York, the musicians of the underground (varying considerably in both genre and quality)–the nearly hunchbacked Jewish man pulling his worn horsehair bow across a beaten violin at Grand Central; the Mexican trio playing accordion, guitar, and singing on the 7; the Chinese man playing the ehru at 14th and 8th–don’t bring me pleasure anymore– if they ever did, which I can’t really remember.
They were a novelty, perhaps– coming, as I did, from the South (where we rode in cars–not subway trains)–but I can’t say I ever really liked the music on the trains or in the stations. They seemed invasive, intrusive, even obnoxious, making me think about lots of things I don’t like to have on my mind when I’m shuttling between points A and B, nose in a book: the intersections of poverty and creativity, immigration, 9 to 5 jobs, the intense need creative people have to be heard or recognized.
There were occasional exceptions– the doughy woman sitting on the platform of the E train at 5th Avenue, who sang like Ella reincarnated. God, she could sing. Hearing her, I got off the train and listened and listened and left a dollar and thought about her all afternoon…and think about her still.
And today. January 3. The Tin Pan Blues Band, who blew so hard and sang so gravelly and grooved so fine that I was certain they’d been swept here from some crazy wind blowing up from New Orleans. Couples danced– really–in a space that had opened up in the middle of one of the busiest stations in the city.
Later, a six year old kid would play his two song repertoire (“Fur Elise” and “Jingle Bells,” one followed by the other and then a medley of both) on a Casio keyboard, over and over while a man on the other side of the platform had a heart attack. The boy’s father (dressed just like his son from the waist up) would sit and read from religious tracts while adults wondered what to feel and whether they should drop a buck in the bucket regardless (“What’s their story?” “There’s a recession.”). I waited for the train and tried not to think about it–about what made the man bring his kid down here to play the horrific mashed up tune again. And again. And again.
Instead, I thought of Tin Pan….
What fun! Yes the music can be intrusive, but really, if you just accept it for what it is — even the annoying — and take joy in finding these guys or the Ella like singer.
Joshua Bell, a renowned violinist played the DC metro ways… and not one person stopper. However those same people would later spend hundreds of dollars to watch him play the Kennedy Stage. He played, in the underground, Big Red a circ 1800(sometime really old)Strat which I heard him play, at the Kennedy Center and is incredible in sound. So go figure. Slow down. Enjoy the street music. There are pearls amongst the swine.