WILD ENTERPRISE

Any busker will tell you that the best day is always the first sunny one after consecutive days of rain. Apply that principle to seasons, and you'll understand why street-performing is more rewarding in spring than in summer.

A role that I at once relish and regret is that of playing the local version of the legendary Punxsutawney Phil. That's how some interpret the first appearance of a busker following winter, especially those prolonged, brutal winters that cause as many people to look for me north of Boston as look for Elvis anywhere near Memphis.

While Phil may or may not cast a six-week winter shadow every February 2, a prediction of what's to come, we come out of hibernation whenever that shadow lifts, a confirmation of what is. Phil retreats into his hole, but we'll stay in the sun. Years ago I found it somewhat humbling to be compared to a rodent, no matter how pleasant the smile or generous the accompanying tip, but I'm now most thankful that I hear harbinger and herald far more than groundhog.

As if to contradict the comparison, my opening days rarely occur before April, at least two weeks beyond Phil's worst-case forecast. Perhaps the stronger connection would be to opening day for Major League Baseball, which much of New England regales as a combination of civic holiday, religious observance, something akin to the start of fishing season in Minnesota.

It's a time of year when I can't help but remind anyone approaching me between songs that our beloved Red Sox did, in fact, trade Babe Ruth for the rights to the musical No, No, Nanette! My favorite line, as I unclip and reclip wooden clothespins to secure another page on my stand: "The greatest player in the history of the game was traded for sheet music." Play Ball! Play Music!

Like ballplayers, buskers tend to be superstitious, and some consider it bad luck to play before April 15. Not to wander too far from the theme of sunshine and shadow, but the day the Internal Revenue Service comes after me will be the day of my first application for a National Endowment. Retroactive. Like Phil, I've never drained government funds. If pilgrims to Punxsutawney, Penn., treat him to bits of food, so too do I turn tips into cups of coffee and lunch downtown. If he's wildlife, then I'm "wild enterprise." Call it even...

UNEVEN PLAYING FIELD

But it's not even. Phil need only appear, but a busker must perform. Hence, the expectation in the voice of the year's first passerby as I prepare--in this order--my music stand, my basket, my business cards, my CDs, my instruments, and then take a deep breath and bow to the sheets I've queued up:

"I hope you've been practicing this winter."

With a motion to include the setting: "I thought that's what all this was for."

"Oh, oh!"

He'd be back to reassure me that I hadn't become "too rusty." but I was hitting too many wrong notes and failing to find passages in favorite tunes I'd been playing for twenty years. Of course, having discovered that problem twenty years ago, I begin opening day with a few improvisational, uptemo jams in at least three keys. A few minutes for each of these and, if I'm comfortable with one, I segue into one of those favorite tunes.

WINDFALLS

This isn't much different from my attack on any other busking day. Always start with at least one improvisation played away from the stand--but in the key of a least one piece that is on the stand. That, in turn, is a tactic I employ throughout the performance, and it does captivate those who may pause to watch between errands: The sight of the musician in a rapid, foot-stomping free-for-all making a move toward the composed sheet, as if planned, and suddenly standing still--with good posture--to play music slowed down, stately.

When the transition is smooth--and since the music is all in the same key, there's no reason it should not be--people will tip as much for what appears to be a magical trick, or optical illusion, as for the song. These are as close as I come to windfalls.

OUT OF THE ORDINARY

That tactic attracts many people and makes many others roll their eyes for precisely the same reason: It's unusual, a contradiction of what is commonly known and seen, and, more pointedly, it crosses boundaries. In a world of television, movies, nightclubs, and concerts, everyone sees musicians in one of those two modes: foot-stomping or composed.

Unlike the stage or shows which insist on that boundary--how else could they advertise?--the street favors the out-of-bounds, the eclectic, the eccentric. This is why, as Patricia Campbell noted with numerous examples in Passing the Hat. musicians with unusual instruments do very well because they draw so much curiosity.

Inadvertantly, I would learn that on my own: An elderly fellow with whom I had exchanged greetings for the first five years I busked Newburyport told me of a recorder that sat unplayed in his closet. He took pride in having found it in a pawn shop while stationed in Germany following World War II and wanted me to have it if I would guarantee that I would play it.

Turned out to be a bass recorder, as large as a bassoon, or a baseball bat, with a saxophone-like tube for a mouthpiece that makes it look like something other than simply a big recorder. At times I have to hide it because little kids will go bug-eyed and yell at me "Play that one! Play the big one!" while I'm trying to play one of the others.

For as little as I do play it, however, it makes a nice conversation piece. I'll describe it as a converted Civil War cannon to most folks, which will make parents chuckle while their children try to recall pictures and drawings in their history books. To those about my age out of the hearing of kids, I call it a "re-tooled bong" and sniff under the screw-on top just before hitting a few notes.

But no matter who's listening, anything that I play on it, improvisation or song, I introduce as "The Carpal Tunnel Jig." Unfortunately, that part of the joke is no joke.

KEEPING A STRAIGHT FACE

Then again, many will take it literally. How would they know? You learn in time, instinctively, to keep an eye on the listener and if he or she looks puzzled, you let them in on it with a wink, but the best laugh will come if you launch immediately into song. Anyone my age could have learned this much from watching The Steve Allen Show back in the Fifties.

The nature of busking--as with most any other public endeavor--is that you'll be asked certain questions more times than you can count. Inevitably you develop pat answers and, if you have an entertainer's instincts, you'll find lines that draw laughter and smiles. The stage performers at folk festivals and renaissance faires are well-versed in this, and if you see them more than once, you may wonder at their ability to tell the same joke, make the same wisecrack, at the same time during their set, as if it's the first time, spontaneous.

In the street, it's the same dynamic up-close and personal, and you tailor your answer to something that was in the question or something that you can discern about the questioner. Busking may be the only public act that allows you to freely remark on the clothing and various affects of other people in public. T-shirts, sweatshirts, and hats, have especially allowed me to get a lot of mileage out of geography.

Why not? People approaching a busker have already opened a door into the unknown, the unlikely. Good natured kidding will be as welcome as the good natured music that drew them in the first place. If the foremost value of buskers is the memorable moments we create for people, then these brief exchanges--or longer conversations, as can happen--are as much a part of it as the music, or juggling, or clowning, or any other act.

Not only have I gained generous tips from folks for these exchanges, I often notice that I gain tips from others who witness and perhaps overhear them. That's why a busker should speak in a normal voice, not yelling, but never softly. And with authority--certainly free of those habits that seem bred in our colleges and universities these past twenty years at least: the rising inflection that makes every sentence sound like a question, the nervous giggle that makes any sentence sound like it has a built-in apology.

Buskers at our best make our language as authentic and as bold as our art. In a world that is increasingly artificial and passive, this is precisely why anyone would ever be drawn to us. Not coincidentally, this is when buskers enjoy a taste of celebrity status. Out-of-towners feel free to engage us in conversation, and often rely on us, tip for tip, to tell them where to eat, drink, and merrily bury their credit cards.

As people take leave, I make a point of playing a song back behind the stand, straightfaced, and projecting so that they'll hear it for as long as possible. No matter what the exchange was, how long or how many laughs were shared, it's important that the see that what they exit is just what they entered. Call it another optical illusion, but it's the performer, not the joker, that I hope to reinforce in that lasting memory, the music that is most authentic and bold.

PLAYING OUT THE CLOUDS

Not long ago New England suffered a winter so brutal that when it got to be March 54th and the temperture finally hit 50, I took a shovel downtown and cleared my spot in order to play. Wasn't the first time. Since my instruments are wood, I can play in Christmas season, courtesy of fingerless gloves.

With the first toss of the shovel I ruefully recalled that about a month earlier, back around February 44th, a city councillor asked how things were going for me downtown. Well, three snowstorms later I wanted to tell him that downtown needs a dome--retractable like the ones in Toronto and Seattle. Wish buskers and ballplayers had that in common!

With the Farmer's Almanac--which has a far more detailed record than Phil or I for tracking the weather--threatening at least one more storm, I warned a few well-wishers that the day's performance was unofficial, "off the CD." Since the mall was a mess--even the snow I shoveled had to go somewhere--I played that day for fewer folk than most stage performers see backstage. Well, if baseball teams play pre-season games that don't count in the standings, I can always rehearse, call it quits at any time.

But I was committed to a full nine innings when the proprietor of a nearby card shop--"music to browse by" is how her customers regard me--pitched in a generous incentive as soon as I began. "Making sure you don't change your mind," she explained over her shoulder as she disappeared back into the store.

A gust of wind kicked up so soon after her that I thought I might have to return the money. At that moment a woman whisked by, bent forward, clutching coat to throat, commanding: "Keep playing! We need you to play in the spring!"

When I was new to busking I might have chided her with a mention of how she might better encourage me to do as she wanted, but before long a busker learns that these folk will be by again--and again and again and again. What was new to me was the use of play in as a single word, an active verb, and not until I described that scene to several friends did I realize that there are but two possible subjects of that verb: buskers and baseball players.

In recent years when I hear a remark like that--and they are frequent on opening days--I offer a gag line: "Listen, I'll gladly take requests, but these move-the-clouds expectations are not in my repertoire!"

BON APPETITE

Buskers use the winter months to expand the repertoire. During one winter when I was still teaching at Northeastern University in Boston, I resolved to learn more challenging Baroque pieces to complement my mostly Celtic playlist. And I thought I would do best to learn pieces that most people have heard from time to time, might even regard as familiar--even though they might not be able to identify them.

The strategy is well-suited to a busker, and it's another way of opening a door. If you can play a simple melody such as the Ode to Joy, and someone tells you that they've always liked that tune, then you can tell them that it's part of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, fully orchestrated with chorus. They may not have known that, may have thought that it was merely background music for a car commercial, a jingle for an in-coming call on a cellphone, a soundtrack for a cartoon. Once they know the context, they may look for it. In the Sixties we called this "turning someone on," but now that I'm nearer to 60, I'd rather think of it as offering an appetizer.

Appetizers that I thought I could well prepare and serve, and that would have some familiar taste after being used as ingredients for commercials and cartoons, were J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerti and Orchestral Suites. I found a Dover paperback with all ten pieces for a surprisingly low price and spent hours with it in Northeastern's library, listening to the school's CDs through headphones on the school's high-tech player, watching the timer, taking notes on the notes. Who says that adjunct faculty have no benefits?

Picked a good spot, too, overlooking the Ruggles subway stop, an architectural suggestion of the grand old European train stations, imagining that I was taking part in the original composition in Leipzig rather than a Cliff Notes version of melody lines for the coastal tourist towns north of Boston.

When I first took the results to the street, an opening day, I stumbled through a few Brandenburg allegros and most of the Second Orchestral Suite. These would take time, but no matter. With the mood downtown on an opening day, I could've played F-flat--the note Jimi Hendrix famously requested of his band at Woodstock--for 90 minutes straight and still gained credit for the arrival of spring.

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH

Before I succumbed to the temptation to fall back on familiar jigs and reels, I recalled another busking principle: Many passersby enjoy the trial-and-error process a musician employs to master acrobatic licks. Those who have never encountered a street-musician experience this when walking through a neighborhood or in a school or some other building and pick up the strains of a musical instrument working through scales or arpeggios. The tendency is always to slow down, to pause if you have time, and mentally pull for the musician to play better, to reach higher, to develop the music.

That a street-musician has people to hear this trial-and-error is incentive to land those daring high notes on jumps from the lower octave. I've seen dozens of would-be street-musicians set up, play well for a while but slack off when the traffic slows, become discouraged when no-one is around. Few of them return. The busker keeps in mind that there's always the possibility that someone has stopped to listen, that anybody we know or might want to know may be listening to us, out of our view.

Playing for that possibilty is the busker's version of what writers and composers call their muse, But I prefer former Oklahoma Representative J.C. Watts' oft-quoted definition of a word: "Character is what you do when no-one's looking."

However, if anyone, real or imagined, is going to listen to trial-and-error, it will be only for a short time. So you reward them with something that you know well. All that work with the difficult Baroque pieces, long before I finally got them--okay, some of them--down, made me far more dexterous with the Irish and Scottish standbys, able to embellish with variations, change keys, and add unexpected, smooth half-tones. Following the trial-and-error, it has the effect of sounding like one evolves from the other. Call it trial-and-triumph.

None of this is to suggest that musicians should play anything cold on the street. It simply means that street-musicians are free of the paralysis of perfectionism. The discovery that a piece out of reach can re-energize and excite pieces already down doesn't come during improvisations on the street or during reveries while wired to a high-tech sound system in a Boston library. This is one point that street and stage musicians have in common: It comes in those long, ardous hours at home practicing those four- to twelve-note sequences, measure for measure, over and over and over and over, again and again and again.

For a while, usually longer than we care to admit, a difficult piece sounds like drivel. That's the trial. Eventually the notes fall into place. That's the triumph.

In the street, some of them will develop with polish and pizzazz while others will remain tentative, but those others have still served the purpose of improving your chops, which will brighten the rest of your repertoire. That's street-music.