Hamm Lynn, Street Piper
When the
Saints Go Busking Out
We are a rare breed in a time and place increasingly distrustful of
strangers and pressured by schedules. We invite conversation
and often have it with folk we've neither seen before nor will see
again. Still, it's quite noticeable how willing the rest of
you are to engage us--street-performers, or buskers to use the
precise term--in two subjects that you would hesitate to broach with
your closest friends: One is the question of how much money we
make; the other is the offer of advice concerning where to make
it.
After more than 20 years plying this trade, my first and foremost
advice for aspiring street-musicians and most other buskers is
this: Never take advice. I learned this the hard way
early on when, at the end of a rather successful Christmas season in
Denver, I let a friend talk me into a raid of New Orleans during
Mardi Gras.
His claim that Jackson Square would have ten times the crowds than
any for which I played in Larimer Square was understated. New
Orleans offers many more settings than Denver, all of them packed
through February. Add to that the encroaching Rocky Mountain
winter compared to the Southern comfort of Louisiana, and I was on
the phone to find any accomodations I could with friends of friends
in the Crescent City.
Never did it occur to me as a novice busker that New Orleans' long
tradition of jazz would be matched by an equally long tradition of
jazz in its streets. While in Denver, I could always find a
spot out of hearing of any other street-musicians already playing; in
New Orleans I found other buskers waiting not-always patiently for
spots to come free. Worse, New Orleans' downtown spaces are
more open, its air much heavier than I had in the enclosed brickwork
of mile-high Larimer Square.
Add to all of that the presence of so many brass horns, clarinets,
banjos, accordions, and drums, and you can understand why a player of
relatively soft-voiced recorders was quickly blown--like a tennis
player off a hockey rink--away from La Rue de Bourbon, out of Jackson
Square and all the main action.
So I slipped down the quieter streets, looking for a spot that might
be both playable and modestly profitable. My hopes rose at the
sight of the spires of an elegant church, but as I approached I was
discouraged by a faint sound. Drawing closer, I knew I was
listening to a concertina, that most enchanting cousin to the
accordion, but I stopped before coming into the musician's view,
not wanting to interrupt him. He played so well that I listened
to a few tunes, a Celtic selection much like my own, before I
approached.
He knew instinctively, perhaps helped by the sight of the duffle bag
(what else would it carry?) or by the look on my face (how long
had he been a busker?), what I was about to ask. And it
may be a mere trick of memory, but I swear he answered first:
"You're from the Boxcar Express!" he laughed with an odd blend
of resentment and amusement. "Every year you all come in here
expecting to clean up, and there's so many of you that it's all
chaos and noise. New Orleans is a great place to
play--the other 49 weeks of the year."
He then turned sympathetic, likely because he sensed that I had
walked away from the fray. For starters, I did not fool him by
keeping a distance while he played. As I would soon learn, a
busker develops extraordinary peripheral vision. From the
distance I kept, he not only knew I was there, he fathomed my
curiosity.
New Orleans had at that time a regular cast of buskers, but according
to the concertinist, not one of them played Bourbon Street or Jackson
Square with any serious intent during Mardi Gras. Some had
their gimmicks, such as a drum or cymbal strapped to the back played
by a rope attached to a tapping foot, and were loud enough to make it
worthwhile, but most disdained the side-show image that a busker
inevitably assumes in large festivals. Some planned out-of-town
vacations and gigs, sometimes scoping other cities and towns to busk
during Mardi Gras, while others, such as this fellow before the
church, look for calm settings with acoustic advantages to practice
new material. Sheer numbers of people deaden acoustics, and
people frequently bark at you in such an environment, no matter what
you are playing or where you are in it, sometimes heckling, sometimes
requesting a favorite song.
Five years after this conversation, I would move back to my native
Massachusetts, and start busking in a seacoast tourist town which
hosts "Yankee Homecoming" for one week every summer. Call
it a micro-Mardi Gras, with vendors and entertainers, cafe tables and
chairs all over the main street and a few streets off it.
Within another two years I would write a column for the local daily
under the headline, "The Other 51 Weeks of the Year."
Granted, my thousand mile trip to the Bayou is an extreme example of
well-intended advice erroneously taken. More often a listener
will urge one of us to attend a local fair, try a busy intersection,
a city park, an esplanade along a river. For as few as there
are who ever do it, there is no limit to the number who think they
know how to do it.
Their formula is very simple: A busker's success is directly
correlated to numbers of people. At times they might be right,
but usually not for the reason they think. They rarely, if
ever, consider acoustic properties, much less the aesthetic quality
of a place, and other variables, all of which you need to learn for
yourself. Call it hyperbole if you want, but my "Never take
advice" is really nothing more--or less--than the street-version of
"Do your homework!"
The exception, of course, is advice offered by another
street-musician who will consider the sounds and sights of spots you
may overlook, or underhear. Why else would I write this?
To be fair, I have benefitted from suggestions of friends, relatives
and strangers alike regarding how I dress, my posture, my selection
and order of material. But if "location, location,
location" is an adage pitched publically by real estate agents, it
is one better held privately by buskers.
Oh, about that other subject, the question of income? I'll
never go there.
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