Music: The Bands of Summer

Street minstrels fill American cities with a joyful noise

Aicient Athens had its bards. Medieval France had its jongleurs; Elizabethan London, its ballad singers and costermongers. Today, U.S. cities have their street musicians: modern minstrels who weave their fragile melodies over the pedal point of trucks and subways, amid a chorus of honking horns and an obbligato of blaring transistor radios.

Day and night you find them, on museum steps, in parks and markets, along waterfronts and under arcades. The groups have antic names like the Tarmac Trio, Three-Part Invention and Dynamic Logs. Mimes, jugglers and fire-eaters often join in the act. Not far behind them come the hot-dog vendors and balloon men. The minstrels provide the nation’s most colorful, if casual, summer musical diversions.

What’s your pleasure? A “steel pianist” who plays Beethoven’s Für Elise on the cut-off top of a 55-gal. oil drum? Step right up. A conga drummer with a silver earring in one nostril and a red gem in the other, or a classical guitarist in top hat, tails and tennis shoes? Right this way. String quartets, punk rockers, brass quintets, bagpipers, country crooners, dixieland stompers, ad hoc duos of every string, woodwind and percussive persuasion? Just around the corner.

At their feet an instrument case usually lies open. Listeners offer what they can—a few coins, flowers, a can of beer, a potato. A drunk once astonished a Boston musician by removing his trousers and donating them. Best of all are the “silent offerings” (noiseless folding green). The average take is $5 to $10 an hour, but talent and a good location can raise that to $30 or $40, and occasionally more.

Few are in it for the money anyway. Says Rich Schwagerl, a conservatory student who plays jazz in a Boston marimba-vibraphone duo: “We’re having a good time, making enough to cover expenses —gas, a few sodas—and catching a few rays.” Moreover, says his partner, Richard Sprince, “good-looking babes come up and admire our musicianship.”

An escape from four walls is the street musicians’ major incentive. “I just wanted to do music without any kind of reviews, sales pitches, verbiage or anything—just music,” says John Thomas, who plays folk music and Bach on his six-string guitar for strolling office workers in Washington. Boston Cellist Paul Stouthamer senses that “people are revolting against mechanical power. They’re looking for a cello, they’re looking for a flute.”

Most of the performers are young, though an occasional patriarch emerges, like the banjo-playing retired executive vice president of Filene’s department store in Boston. Some are music students or card-carrying professionals. Others are moonlighting (or sunlighting) engineers, carpenters, bookkeepers. Among the assortment on this summer’s scene:

> Shanti Spaeth and her husband Karl regard street music as theater. They unashamedly cater to the tourists around Jackson Square, in New Orleans’ French Quarter, by wearing ragtag getups and going barefoot. Karl, besides playing guitar, mandolin and trombone, laces their performances with his own political jokes and humorous songs (Ain ‘t No Sin to Take off Your Skin and Dance Around in Your Bones). But all is seriousness when Shanti belts out blues or scats like Ella Fitzgerald on Satin Doll. The couple were married nine days after meeting at a crafts fair in Oregon a year and a half ago. With the coming of hot weather in New Orleans, they decided to work their way west through fairs and markets and end up in Portland, where they have a cabin. When last glimpsed, they were living in their car, trying to raise money for a carburetor and tire.

> Stephen Baird, 31, took to the streets during the antiwar crusade of the 1960s, and has been there ever since. A guitarist and dulcimer player, as well as a singer, he ranges out from his Boston base to cities and campuses across the country, carrying word of protest movements and food coops wherever he goes. His favorite cause is street music itself. He hopes for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to write a book about its lore, its leading lights and its legal problems. Balding, with thick wire-rimmed spectacles, Baird likes to work the same crowd for hours, usually starting with something loud, then inviting everybody to sit down. “I’ve had standing ovations, which means you’ve got to get them to sit down first.”

> Robert Leuze never thought of singing, on the street or anywhere else, until he was past the make-or-break age for most vocalists. Now, two or three evenings a week, he stands in front of Broadway theaters, performing baritone arias from The Marriage of Figaro or La Traviata to the accompaniment of a tape recorder. A Yale liberal arts graduate and a former high school science teacher, Leuze has been trying to launch a career with small opera companies in the New York area. “It usually blows someone’s mind to hear me in full voice on the street,” he says. Once, as he was approaching the climactic A-flat in the prologue to I Pagliacci, a bus stopped between him and his audience. Without missing a beat, he stepped into the bus, blasted out the Aflat, then hopped back onto the sidewalk as the startled driver and passengers rolled away.

All street musicians are vagabonds of the spirit. A few, like Baird and the Spaeths, are literal vagabonds as well, carried by caprice along informal circuits of such cities as Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, New Orleans and Key West. A folk quartet called the Nee Ningy Band has also covered Africa and Western and Eastern Europe during its ten-year career. Consisting of fiddle, harmonica, bodhran (a flat goatskin drum) and penny whistle, the group takes its name from the sound the fiddle makes—nee ningy, nee ningy, nee ningy. Its members carry camping equipment, often stay in local homes. Says Violinist Rachel Maloney: “You learn to live with the insecurity, just as you learn to live with security.”

San Francisco’s Grimes Poznikov, who plays trumpet from inside a 6-ft. canvas box and bills himself as the “automatic human jukebox,” rates cities by numbers: 14 for Seattle, 22 for New York, and so on. The numbers are his estimate of how many minutes a street musician can perform before getting moved on for soliciting or creating a disturbance. Cops, like rain, are a prime occupational hazard. Boston Licenses its performers for $10. Other cities give the police wide discretion to act on complaints about noise, or to play music critic.

Increasingly, shopping centers and civic institutions are recruiting street musicians instead of complaining about them. Boston’s Quincy Market, Manhattan’s Lincoln Center and San Francisco’s Cannery all audition or actually hire them for scheduled performances. In Boston, a nonprofit group called Articulture Inc. deploys street musicians at three subway stops during rush hours, which “lowers the collective blood pressure.” Currently, commuters at the Park Street station are bemused to encounter Nancy Feins strumming the strains of C.P.E. Bach on the harp. “One woman asked me if this was a harpsichord,” says Feins. “Another person swore it was the inside of a piano.”

Purists may deplore such organized programs, but most musicians welcome them. No matter how gratifying it is for its own sake, street performing remains a perpetual audition. Few itinerant musicians would turn down a club date, TV shot or record contract.

Meantime, the street gives them a valuable apprenticeship in capturing the least captive of audiences. Pedestrians, after all, have their minds on bills and backaches rather than on Telemann partitas. With no investment in a ticket, they find it easiest to review a performance with their feet: they keep on walking. Hence a by-God spontaneous response is the street musicians’ sweetest reward. A Seattle group called Brandywine (violin, hammer dulcimer, guitar, bass) will always cherish the moment during the Fat Tuesday celebration when its galloping rendition of the William Tell Overture so inflamed a woman bystander that she bounded up onto a horse behind a mounted policeman. Hi-ho, Rossini!