ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 5, 1997 TAG: 9701030021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
You hear it first from a distance, maybe getting off the Broadway line or coming through the 57th Street subway turnstile: a gravelly, loving, resonant voice melting into a blues guitar.
Draw nearer now. Over the thunder of approaching trains and the ambient noise of coughs, turnstile clicks and muted radios in Manhattan's Columbus Circle station, a man belts out soulful melodies, soothing cranky commuters. His brow is drenched. His bag is full of $1 bills. He is surrounded by smiling people.
His name is Roger Ridley. He is a subway musician. Smiles and dollar bills are his staples.
``I'm in the joy business,'' says Ridley, 49, who left a 25-year job with United Cerebral Palsy to play full time underneath Manhattan. ``I watch people's faces, and I know they appreciate this after working in offices all day.''
Now, two young record producers who dreamed of bringing New York subway music to the world have given Ridley and more than a dozen other men and women a chance to make their subterranean music more permanent.
``People wake up a little when they hear these incredible performers,'' says Jamie Propp, the 26-year-old co-producer of ``Subplay,'' a melting-pot album of music that is a virtual ride along a New York City line.
``We live so much for the moment in this city, and then the moment's gone,'' Propp says. ``We've tried here to take the moment and put it on a pedestal.''
That can be difficult in New York, a metropolis of many faces - the glitzy New York of Midtown, the residential New York of the Upper West Side, the iconoclastic New York of the East Village, the working-class neighborhoods of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.
Nowhere, however, is there a New York so universal to the city's identity as the subway - the transportation standard of the masses in one of the few American cities not consumed by automobile culture.
People travel through here in their shells - hurried, often callous, inured to outside stimuli. They cram train cars like cattle and read papers folded into tiny squares. The weight of the world above is palpable.
So, though the busker tradition is a venerable one - folk legend Woody Guthrie played in New York's subways in 1941 with a young Pete Seeger - the mixture of frantic motion and musical solace seems almost incongruent.
Yet despite stringent regulations since rescinded, music, in some form, has been around since the subway first opened, according to Susie J. Tanenbaum, author of the 1995 subway music book ``Underground Harmonies.''
``It is the true subculture - it's the real New York underground scene,'' says Adam Chalk, 25, Propp's partner. The two were college friends and opened their studio, ``As Is Entertainment,'' in Manhattan's meatpacking district last year.
``Who would think you could go into the subway and hear a concert by a Chinese artist from a famous musical family?'' Chalk says.
That would be Cao Baoan, a fourth-generation musician whose specialty is the erhu, a Chinese string instrument. He came to New York from Tianjin, China, in 1994, and at first worked in a restaurant and as a housekeeper while giving erhu lessons in Queens.
``One day, I saw an American playing guitar on the subway platform. And they were giving him all this money,'' Cao, who speaks little English, said in Chinese during a recent performance at Grand Central Terminal. ``They saw my erhu and said, `Join us for a moment.' And all these people came.''
He made $60 for two hours' work. Today he supervises six Chinese musicians playing different gigs across the subway system.
``I was worried that working in the subway wouldn't look good. I used to think that the people who played in the subway were poor with nowhere to go. It's just not true,'' says Cao, who played Carnegie Hall last year and got gigs as far as Florida from people he met in the subway.
That's precisely the image Propp and Chalk wanted to combat. They trolled sometimes dark, often dank underground stations for months, meeting more than 200 musicians and winnowing them down. They found a saw player from Israel, a kazoo expert from Ghana, Andean fluters from Peru.
``Did they have a spark? Did they have an edge? Did they bring the audience in? All of that was important,'' Chalk says.
They thought first about recording in the subways, then realized they wanted to give the artists a chance at studio recordings - something many already had done.
``I've heard of people just recording from the street, which is kind of nice, but I like the idea of taking musicians from the street and into the studio to show what they can do,'' says Luke Ryan, who has been playing blues guitar in the subway for 15 years.
``People listen to this and say, `Wow - I didn't realize this was going on right under the street here,''' he says. ``I love the concept that it's for everybody. That's the great part about New York. You can stand on a street corner and travel around the world.''
The album that emerged was a compelling - and very urban - combination of jazz, soul, rock and, of course, Cao's Chinese traditional music. Many of the musicians are masters; one, alto sax player Sayyd Abdul al-Khabyyr, used to play with Dizzy Gillespie.
The tunes are, quite literally, catchy - as they must be to catch the passing populace.
``Just like people make connections between trains, these guys have to make connections with their audiences,'' Propp says. ``And those who can show their heart down there - and show it quick - those are the ones who make it.''
Each full studio cut is alternated with a brief intermezzo of another musician - some a capella, some with nothing more than a harmonica or a thumb piano. One duet that sings ``This Little Light O'Mine'' uses their change cups for percussion. A real conductor, Al Torres, narrates a virtual trip up the Broadway line of Manhattan's West Side.
The CD, advocates say, is merely the latest example of how subway musicians are getting more respect.
``There's more of an air of legitimacy out there now,'' says Bruce Edwards, 34, a guitarist and band leader who sits on his amplifier and soothes commuters with a beautiful, soft electric guitar.
An 11-year-old program called Music Under New York, sponsored by the city's Transit Authority, supports underground musicians and doles out ``assignments'' to regulars while also encouraging free-lancers.
``It adds a whole cultural dimension to what it means to go to work and using a transit system,'' says Tim Higginbotham, who does consulting work for the program, known as MUNY.
``I think it's the most accessible cultural activity there is out there,'' he says. ``There's nothing that's more immediate than this kind of thing. It's just a part of your daily life. And that's really what music should be about.''
For Ridley, who says he makes $700 playing three two-hour stints per week, the music is about connecting with the audience. ``Subplay,'' he says, represents another way to do that.
``One time,'' he recalls, ``I was doing a song about drug addiction called `Just Say No.' I was playing it on 42nd Street and I could see who the addicts are. I could see it in their eyes. And this guy from across the tracks - he jumps down onto the tracks and climbs up onto the platform. And there's tears in his eyes and he gave me $20. He was crying.
``And I have people tell me, `Man, every time I see you I get mad, because you make me stay and I miss four or five trains.'
``These kinds of things, that's what I have to hear. Because I will never get the kind of satisfaction anywhere else that I get from playing for people in the street.''
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