The other day I was walking downtown and heard music wafting from the Farragut North Metro stop a block away. There was nothing strange about that: The sidewalks outside subway stops have a high volume (pun intended) of buskers. Street guitarists screech through distorted amplifiers. Parades’ worth of large-lunged trombonists blat and blare to funk beats supplied by Sousaphone and snare.
What was odd was the sound itself. It wasn’t the usual rough and rowdy subway stuff. It was a proper jazz combo. It was extraordinarily good — so much so that a wave of depression hit me over the idea that such great musicians, which was obvious even at a distance, had been reduced to busking.
Then I remembered the stunt pulled by the Washington Post a dozen years ago. They dressed up violin virtuoso Joshua Bell as a street musician and had him play Bach at the Metro to see if anyone would notice. I was starting to notice that the saxophonist leading the band down the street sounded suspiciously like Joshua Redman. Was this another stunt?
As I got closer, the band only sounded better. But I couldn’t see them. They must have been set up inside the mouth of the subway stop, by the escalators. When I got there, I found the Metro was musician-free. The band was somehow overhead. I looked up and saw an array of high-quality speakers. I was indeed hearing Joshua Redman — a recording of the saxophonist. How strange, I thought: Recorded music is usually just played at a background level. But the volume here was that of a real, unamplified band.
For years, classical music has been used to annoy those who might otherwise loiter and get up to no good. As Lily E. Hirsch tells it in Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, 7-Eleven is widely regarded as having been the first company to make it a matter of security policy to play Easy Listening or classical music in their parking lots to keep kids from hanging out. (Just imagine the crowd-clearing tear-gas-like effect to be achieved if one could only get recordings of Perry Como crooning Wagner.) Music was weaponized when Manuel Noriega was holed up in the Vatican’s embassy in Panama. In the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. interrogators subjected prisoners to Eminem at jet-airplane decibels. If the moral issues surrounding torture and near-torture weren’t so fraught, this is where one would insert a joke about prisoners begging their tormentors to stop the Slim Shady and waterboard them instead.
The managers of the building over the Farragut North Metro stop are doing something rather more subtle than using music as an annoyance. They aren’t trying to drive people away, or at least not people in general, just that small subset of the sidewalk population armed with trombones, Sousaphones and drum kits, or those wielding electric guitars and amplifiers cranked up to 11.
The tenants of the office building over the Metro stop have been complaining for years that the buskers below their windows are a nuisance, that they feel a bit like old Noriega at the Apostolic Nunciature. The new sidewalk jazz soundtrack is dialed in to be just loud enough to make a muddle of the busker’s music, encouraging them to find some other corner at which to play.
I stood on the street and enjoyed not only Redman but Benny Golson and then Ray Brown. It was wonderful and awful. Wonderful to hear good tunes. Awful that such good tunes had been reduced to busker repellant.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
