SAX
ON THE STREETS
Confessions of an American Street Musician in Europe
by Daniel Gordon
EXCERPT
Preface
If the street musician is reasonably well-groomed and even
moderately talented, everybody loves him. Everybody, that
is, except for irate shop owners who are annoyed by unsolicited
disturbances outside their doors and power-hungry policemen
who have nothing better to do than stop these harmless entertainers
from doing their thing. Just about everyone else loves them.
I’m not sure why; the romance of that wandering lifestyle
seems to strike a special chord and arouse the latent bohemianism
within everyone.
After two summers of street-musicianing, or “busking,”
through thirteen European countries and an American city or
two, I am by no means the foremost authority on the subject.
I have never been a “hard-core” busker who played
on the street full-time. I busked as an addendum to my travels,
to cut costs as I went, and to have a different kind of experience
than the usual tourist activities. But in chatting with other
street musicians about the ins and outs of the trade, I found
that we all faced similar issues, shared similar experiences,
and generally went through a similar process whatever the
act was, be it bagpipes, bongos, banjos, accordions, violins,
or even spoons.
This book recounts the busking experiences I had with a college
buddy as we traversed the Continent playing baroque duets
on two saxophones. It tells a few tricks of the trade and
expresses my feelings about the people, places, and things
we encountered. Our busking was entirely peripatetic; that
is, we learned everything by going, observing, playing, talking,
and asking questions. This story is, therefore, not necessarily
definitive on any of the topics discussed, but true to what
we found along the way.
In telling it all, I hope to give a feeling for the kind of
life these mysterious entertainers of the street lead: what
goes on in their heads while on the street and what goes on
in their lives while off it. For while everybody loves the
street musician, few really know the street musician. And
at the very least, I’m hopeful this tale will make you
that much more willing to toss some spare change at the next
busker you see.
Chapter 1:
Barcelona, Spain
Enjoy this Meal
It was an omen: I was standing on the information line at
the train station in Barcelona, Spain, when from amid the
commotion I suddenly heard someone yell, “Hey, Gordon,
what are you doing here?” I spun around. Ten yards away
stood my friend Gary, whom I hadn’t seen in half a year.
“Gary!” I hollered. “What the—You’re
not supposed to—How can you—I DON’T BELIEVE
IT!”
“How’d you know to meet me here, Dan?” he
asked calmly.
“How did I know? I didn’t! I’m not here
to meet you—you’re not even supposed to be in
this country yet!” He wasn’t due in Spain for
another few days. Our meeting was pure coincidence.
Or was it? I believe it was an omen about the good fortune
to come in our travels as street musicians.
* * * *
Neither Gary nor I can remember exactly how, when, or why
we decided to busk. The closest we can come to pinpointing
the decision is some time during the previous winter, when
I visited home and had a big party for the Christmas holidays.
I had been in Barcelona for a year and a half teaching English,
work I had stumbled upon after three months of post-college
vagabonding across Europe. My visit home served as a college
reunion of sorts at which I saw all my friends for the first
time since I graduated. Gary, the foremost among those friends,
showed up at the party and contracted a serious case of the
travel bug as we discussed my life overseas. We made plans
to meet up during the summer and travel together. The rest
just fell into place. It was a foregone conclusion that if
we were to travel together, we would try to pick up a little
cash along the way by playing the same duets that we had so
often played for nothing while studying saxophone together
in college.
Just as we never consciously chose to busk, we never consciously
decided how to put our act together either. We simply did
what occurred to us naturally. That was to play on two soprano
saxophones, since these were the smallest saxophones both
of us had. We didn’t want to bring anything big if we
could avoid it; the huge backpacks on our backs were enough
to lug around already. We carried our instruments in little
“gig bags”—sleek, padded, leather cases
that were a lot easier to handle than standard wooden boxes.
Our soprano saxophones were curved, less common than the straight
variety, and they proved to be a good choice for a couple
of reasons. First, they were more compact than the straight
kind, again making transport easier; and second, their uncommon
shape attracted a lot of attention. Curious how a little curved
soprano saxophone, which by the very nature of its curves
made it entirely more identifiable as a saxophone, elicited
so many questions. People asked in any variety of languages,
What is that contraption? Is that thing a saxophone, or a
toy? Are those special instruments for little children? How
can you fit your hands on those tiny things? Countless times
we answered, Yes, these are saxophones. Yes, soprano saxophones.
Yes, they’re curved. Yes, they’re usually straight.
After a while we grew so tired of explaining the same thing
over and over that I would joke, Yes, this is a curved soprano
saxophone. It used to be straight, but I accidentally sat
on it. That crack usually got us an extra coin in the hat.
It was a hat that we collected our money in, only because
our leather cases didn’t stay open by themselves. Any
hat would have done, as long as it were stiff enough to keep
its shape and deep enough to hold a lot of change. I’ve
met buskers who use buckets, baskets, and inverted umbrellas
to collect their money because they believe earnings increase
in direct proportion to the size of the collection receptacle.
I have no basis to determine if there is any truth to this
theory; we couldn’t experiment because we had to travel
light. For our purposes, a fisherman’s hat, which was
of negligible weight and space, worked fine. We simply placed
it in front of us and tossed in a little of our own change
to start off. No stopping to walk around holding the hat out
and asking for donations—that’s begging. We just
left the hat out there, as if to say, Here’s our music,
if you like it, throw a bit of change in, if not, fine. And
that was how we liked it, even if we made less money that
way.
Our repertory consisted of several volumes of baroque flute
duets by Georg Philipp Telemann. Baroque music on saxophones
is somewhat of a musical oddity since the saxophone was invented
100 years after the baroque period. But as classically trained
musicians, both Gary and I had been brought up on Telemann,
so that’s what we went with. Actually, the soprano saxophone
adapts remarkably well to baroque flute music. The two instruments
have almost identical ranges, so we read straight off the
flute parts and it worked great. In fact, for busking purposes,
soprano saxophones might even be more effective than flutes
because their sound carries much farther. And they certainly
attract a lot more attention. Nobody expects to hear saxophones
playing baroque music. Add that to the visual curiosity aroused
by our peculiar little instruments, and it gave both an aural
and visual surprise—all the more reason to stop, listen,
and drop a few coins in the hat.
We used music bound in book form, with both parts printed
on a page. That way we needed only one fold-up wire music
stand, which is easily stored and carried. With a book, no
loose pages flapped around in the breeze. A few clothes pins
kept the whole book from flying away, and when heavy wind
threatened to blow the entire stand over, we held it down
on the ground with one foot. The clothes pins created a problem
with page turns, but a few strategically-placed photocopies
fixed that. Once we’d resolved all these little difficulties,
we had four complete books and about 2½ hours of trouble-free
Telemann. And one final touch, which we learned after repeatedly
answering the same questions about what music we were playing:
We left one volume of the unused books turned face-out on
the music stand so that passers-by could see the title. It
saved answering the same question.
Our earnings might have been higher if we had played more
popular music, but we weren’t into it. We felt like
going with what we knew best, and that was classical music.
Playing more popular music for the sake of making more money
would have been “selling out” to some extent.
Besides, there is something to be said for making it with
what you really do best, no matter how esoteric it may be.
To know there’s a way to get by without having to compromise
the thing that gives you the most satisfaction—hey,
that’s where most of the kick comes from.
As for our travel itinerary, our only plans were to head from
Spain in a general northeasterly direction toward Scandinavia.
We had arrangements to participate a month later in a volunteer
camp in Norway where we would paint an old fishing boat among
the fjords at the northern tip of the Continent. I had participated
in a similar volunteer program in Hungary the previous summer
and found these “workcamps” to be an enjoyable
and cheap way to travel. They offered an alternative to the
usual tourist activities and were a great way to meet other
volunteers from around the world. Gary and I hoped to visit
a few friends from my previous workcamps as we went.
That was our basic game plan. We had no idea how much our
act would earn, nor how much we’d play every day; we
didn’t even know exactly where we would go. But we did
know that we’d at least cut our travel expenses with
our music, and no doubt have a blast as we went.
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