Thanks to writing my seven day diary for the South London Press (at a newsagents near you on Friday...if you live in south London) I've recently been spoilt with south of the river music. This isn't a dig at the musical quality north of the river, but...well, living as I do in the foothills south of Peckham that we call Nunhead, it's been good to have the excuse to travel nearer afield. Consequently I found tonight's trip to an open-mic night at The Earl of Camden, in Camden, a bit of an effort. I watched the opening act who was singer-guitarist Treana (I think she also ran the evening). As she played I thought how she, like so many unheralded musicians I've seen over the past eight months, would not be out of place on a summer festival stage. This turned out to be a prescient thought because of another musical encounter a short while later. I left as a young guy was playing his bluesy first song - his face is lit up on the right of the above photo (click for closer view).
The tube to London Bridge stopped at Euston. As the train waited for the green signal I could hear haunting, breathy pipe music swirling around the platform outside (this despite having The Fall on my MP3 player - though not very loudly, I'm sociable like that). In one of those sliding doors moments I got off the tube as the doors slide behind me. At the bottom of the escalator was a guy called Alamin playing an Indian bamboo flute called a bansuri (I have to admit I didn't know it was called that - Alamin told me). He was backed by the percussive pre-recorded sound of, I'm guessing, a tabla. Slightly bizzarely someone else had also heard Alamin's enchanting music and got off the train, though in his case it was because he recognised the sound and the tune and knowing Alamin he wondered if it might be he. I might be wrong, but I think they knew each other from out of London. I chatted with the other guy who'd interrupted his journey, Paul, as we waited for our next tube. He told me something he'd read, about a violinist busker in Central Station, New York who'd been ignored by most people flashing past and received a dollar here and there from a very few others. The violinist was one of the top violinists in the world and he was playing some of the most difficult pieces. So the question Paul asked, and I echo and paraphrase slightly, is, "Do we appreciate music for what it is, or judge it by where it's performed?" Significantly, children passing the violinist busker, hearing only the music, often wanted to stop only to be pulled onwards by their parent.
I've done a bit of research and this article - link below - if not the one that Paul read (it doesn't mention the children, though other related pieces on the net do), tells the tale. The violinist was Joshua Bell. The station was actually in Washington, but what the hey, that's not the point.
Alamin and his bansuri
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