And now, this musical interlude.....

The notes are not always held as long as they should be so the Girl from Ipanema sounds more crunchy, more bebop than bossa nova. The subway saxman hurries through the verse so he can get to the sweet elongated phrases of the more familiar chorus before the next arriving train drowns out his sound. A big guy in a leather coat and white Ipod buds treads up to the open box the saxman is using as a collection basket, water is dripping from his coat and the tilted brim of his Giant's baseball cap. It's raining (again) so everyone is a little damp, but this guy is oozing, no, spewing fluids. A stream of droplets flys towards the bench as he digs into his pocket, shaking himself like some kind of half-bear half-fleeced monster creature, he draws out something and tosses it into the box, then drifts off dripping. There is a pause in the action as the musician changes his tune.


There doesn't seem to be a subway musician who isn't amplified in some way. I don't know how they do it, batteries? They are, most of them anyway, accompanied by a backtrack. I've listened to a very good violinist playing with what sounded like a quartet from Avery Hall and there is a guy down on the Number 1 platform at 42nd who plays a coronet with one hand and a piano keyboard with the other while a tape with some drifty vocals and a ssh-ssh-sshhhh drum machine fills in the rest. He sings too. A nice, boozey oozie baritone that makes you want to shove a dollar in his jar and go find yourself a drink.

The saxman is back up to speed and he is giving them some breezy Jobim tune they all have heard, could it be?, ten thousand times before on every easy listening FM station from Carmel CA to Miami FL and, of course, no one appears to be listening. No one has to listen to something they already know so well. They stand near the edge of the platform, staring down the tunnel, willing the train to arrive or they sit on the completely and fully occupied bench and think about this Monday and how it has gone.

The good news is our train is rattling into the station, we duck around a couple of wet tourists, crumbling up a dollar as we go, tossing it in a perfect practiced arc toward the saxman's bag as we jog left, around a pillar, reaching the platform edge just as the train doors open.