music underground

Our basic method of research was to find and talk to musicians in the subway. Our research including our usual pattern of questions was similar to the shadowing method from the IDEO cards. After having interviewed many musicians in the subway some similarities began to emerge. One of the first things that struck me was that barring two, all the other musicians were extremely friendly. By that I mean you could stop them mid performance to talk to them if you wanted to, and the musicians would respond almost gladly respond and answer every question with a little bit of their own unprovoked personal history. These musicians had all claimed to be playing for anything between two to twenty years. The two musicians I mentioned earlier who were harder to talk to were always respectful, never rude but curt . One of them was playing this really cool electric violin and made $35 odd and gathered a substantial crowd in the first 20 minutes of starting his performance so i can quite understand why he didn't care. All the musicians I spoke to with Anna as well as without, either spoke of their relationship with regard to the authorities, the commuter public as well as fellow musicians or sometimes I was lucky enough to observe some of these interactions first hand. Fellow musicians whether or not playing underground almost always were encouraging both monetarily as well as vocally. Some of these commuter musicians/enthusiasts had even developed acquaintances with these musicians. It is important for me to mention that during research we also discovered that the MTA conducts auditions for a limited number for permits to play legally and we only encountered one with a permit while the rest all played anyway. The local station authorities are usually cautious but even there relationships are cultivated. Joseph from west fourth told me about the advice he was given by another subway musician after being told to leave many times by the authorities, when he first started playing in the subway. He was advised to always be polite and keep going back to his spot (perseverance was his exact word of choice). Eventually the situation got so friendly that the cops or MTA officials at the station would give him a heads up when superiors were due for inspection so he wouldn't get a ticket.
All these musicians when asked of their motivation to play in the subway usually did acknowldge money but it was almost always preceded by their simple intention of getting people to hear their music or the joy it brought them while proudly pointing to their websites or myspace addresses cards and some claimed to have another job or of performing gigs at bars and clubs. Most carried CDs of their work which were either for sale or free with $10 donations. Among some other interesting musicians I met were this old man who told me he spoke little english in an accent unrecognisable as well as hard to comprehend , but intriguingly said he was from portland and had been doing this for 20 years playing three different instruments depending on his mood after his day job.
Another very interesting person we met was called Victor. Victor said he left Nigeria and that Jesus meant for him to come and play music here to speak of him. While I will leave the GOD discussion of delusion vs faith for philosophers or anyone else who cares but what was really interesting came soon after. Victor said that leaving his country to get where he was, was a struggle but once he knew he was here to play music everything simply worked out for him and he's been playing since.
Unknowingly Victor had told me that he was easily accommodated and probably helpfully too, assimilated into the world of these underground musicians.