Overture

Except for the earth we share and the air we breathe, what we all have most in common is a love for music. Whether beating a hollow log or carving holes in a reed or realizing the melodious miracle produced by the human voice, we all love music and often music that is not even our own, for nothing crosses borders as does music.

“Uta wa saki wo musubo” runs a Japanese expression:
“Music ties the world together.”

And Downtown, it’s everywhere: subway platforms, along the streets, in Tompkins Square and Washington Square, in clubs, stores, gyms, our neighbors’ apartments, and through the soft calipers of our earphones. Walk around our streets and you’ll hear a dozen different musical styles: in a Chinese gift store on Bayard, an Indian restaurant on East 6th, an aria in Little Italy, salsa on East First, and in the Village a live Chopin nocturne drifts from an open first floor window. So of course Broadway’s longest running show is not only a musical but one about music. For twenty-five years and 10,000 performances The Phantom of the Opera has enthralled us with its music of the night even if we sat through a matinee
This year’s selections are almost as varied as music itself. There’s folk, funk, jazz, rock, punk rock, Dixie, hip-hop, ragtime, three from Broadway shows, one from a movie, and one from the Ziegfeld Follies. And in this wondrous age of computers, each can be heard on YouTube. So kick back, turn up the volume, close your eyes and let music set you free.

“The Bowery”

The most popular song from an 1891 musical entitled A Trip to Chinatown, the rollicking, farcical “The Bowery” was written by Percy Gaunt with lyrics by Charles H. Hoyt, referred to as the Father of American Farce. The song tells a story about this most notorious section of the Lower East Side though the musical is actually set in San Francisco and has nothing to do with New York.
There are six verses with the song’s famous chorus interspersed throughout:

                                            “The Bow'ry, the Bow'ry!
                                            They say such things,
                                            And they do strange things
                                           On the Bow'ry! The Bow'ry!
                                           I'll never go there anymore!”

The comical song tells of the singer’s misadventures on the Bowery: “Folks who are ‘on to’ the city say,/ Better by far that I took Broadway;/ But I was out to enjoy the sights,/ There was the Bow'ry ablaze with lights.” He’s conned, robbed, tossed out of a bar, has a haircut and shave where the barber “Took off my whiskers and most of my chin,” then gets a black eye and a battered nose. And though the song is lively and funny and written in ¾ time, despite it all the singer repeatedly swears that to the Bowery “I’ll never go there anymore!”
The musical ran at the Madison Square Theater nearly two years and remained the longest running show until the 1919 musical Irene (famous for such songs as “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” and “You Made Me Love You”) which is set in a more genteel Upper West Side. “The Bowery” remains one of New York’s most popular songs, having sold more than a million copies of sheet music. My mother, who used to sing on the radio, sang this song to me when she learned I had moved to the Lower East Side but without any idea what The Bowery was like in 1977.

“The Sidewalks of New York”

Though most of us know it as the happy, rowdy version made popular by New York’s favorite son Alfred Smith in his disastrous 1928 campaign for the presidency, “The Sidewalks of New York” is actually a slow, tender, heart-aching little waltz about remembrance and loss. The tune had been rolling around in the head of Charles Lawlor, a vaudeville actor and composer, when he stopped to visit his friend James Blake working in a hat store. Together they worked on the song, with Blake’s lyrics recalling their old neighborhood that had changed so greatly in such a brief time. For the names heard on those same streets when the song was published in 1894 were far more likely to be Vito and Moishe than the German and Irish from only a generation before. In the song we hear of Jimmy Crow, pretty Nellie Shannon, Jakey Krause “the baker, who always had the dough,” and Mamie O'Rourke, who taught them how to dance. “Things have changed since those days,” the song laments, and the sweet, touching, concluding lines reveal why it must be heard as first intended, a nostalgic recollection of a time gone forever:

“They would part, with all they’ve got, if once more they might walk,
With their best girl, and have a twirl, on the sidewalks of New York.”

Though one of  the most popular songs ever written about New York City, with versions done by Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, and even The Grateful Dead,  James Lawlor died penniless in 1925 despite that the song had sold 5,000 copies a year for over a quarter century.

“Wall Street Rag”

Written in 1909 only two years after moving to New York and depicting on ragtime piano the Stock Market panic of 1907, Scott Joplin wrote “Wall Street Rag” with careful directorial notes throughout the sheet music. Even before the first note is played Joplin’s opening comment reads “Note: Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast.”
The first part begins with ‘panic in wall street, brokers feel melancholy’ though soon the piece picks up some energy with ‘good times coming’ and, only a few bars later, ‘good times have come.’ The rag ends with ‘brokers forget their cares’ and the music grows in power and gayety
Dubbed “The King of Ragtime” after his first big hit “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899, Joplin is best known for his “The Entertainer” written in 1902 and appearing throughout the Academy Award winning film The Sting in 1973. But Joplin’s popularity faded when he turned from ragtime to classical music, composing the opera Treemonisha. Its failure left him desperate, discouraged, and nearly broke, and this while his health was quickly deteriorating due to syphilis. He died at only 49, buried in a pauper’s grave in Saint Michael’s Cemetery in Queens that remained unmarked for over half a century. He was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his contribution to American music. “Wall Street Rag” in particular and much of Joplin’s music captures an energy and optimism felt throughout New York at the beginning of the 20th Century when the city’s progress and power seemed limitless.

“Rose of Washington Square”

First heard in Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic (1921) and sung by the great Fanny Brice, “Rose of Washington Square” tells of Rosie who “used to live up in the Bronx, / but she wander'd from there down to Washington Square, / and Bohemian Honky Tonks.” She becomes an artist’s model (“I'm withering there, in basement air I'm fading”), and though “she's got no future but oh! what a past,/ she's Rose of Washington Square.”
With lyrics by Ballard MacDonald and music by James F. Hanley, the song has two versions but listen to the comic one; “She's terrible good as a model,/ the artists are stuck on her charms,/ once a feller said he would paint Venus from her,/ only Venus ain't got no arms.”
By 1939 the movie Rose of Washington Square told the vaguely disguised story of Brice’s relationship with gambler/con-man Nicky Arnstein, a partner of the notorious Arnold Rothstein. “I never liked the men I loved,” she once said, “and never loved the men I liked.” Fanny’s signature song “My Man” tells of her stormy, even abusive relationship with Arnstein in her own words, sung in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921. Years later Barbara Streisand portrayed Fanny first on Broadway and then in the award-winning musical Funny Girl.
“Rose of Washington Square” has been done by many people, including a jazz version on sax by Harry Allen, but best is hearing Fanny do it herself, full of tenderness, humor, charm, and schmaltz by one of vaudeville’s greatest stars.

“Wall Street Wail”

Though Duke Ellington (born Edward Kennedy Ellington but called Duke because he was so elegant) is best loved by New Yorkers for his great (written by Billy “Sweet Pea” Strayhorn) “Take the A” in 1939, a decade earlier he and the Jungle Band had a great hit entitled “Wall Street Wail” that appeared shortly after the Crash of ’29. Written by Duke along with Barney Bigard (the cat on clarinet who also wrote one of my favorite jazz rags “Sweet Marijuana Brown”), “Wall Street Wail” (aka “Wall Street Shuffle”) is a fast-paced, swinging sound with a lot of reeds and a back-beat of Duke on keys. Though rarely performed with lyrics, it’s a cynical story of greed and suffering–like the very cause and effect of the Great Depression: “Do the Wall Street shuffle/ Hear the money rustle/ Watch the greenbacks tumble/ Feel the Sterling crumble….”
The clarinet (Bigard) and the sweet trumpet blown by Arthur Whetsel carry the piece, with some great bass work by the incredible Wellman Braud, a Creole originally from New Orleans. “Do the Wall Street Shuffle,” the music bubbles, “Let your money hustle/ Bet you'd sell your mother/ You can buy another.”
Bigard tired of traveling with Duke and retired to LA but in April of 1961, he, Duke, and Louis Armstrong did an historic recording session, including such great numbers as “Mood Indigo” and  “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing,” which sounds much like this New York treasure “Wall Street Wail.”

Barney Bigard

“The Brooklyn Bridge”

Though John Roebling’s masterpiece was intended to get us to Brooklyn (and not for Brooklyn to get to Manhattan) we in Manhattan still share claim to the bridge, the awesome sight of it from City Hall inspiring poets and painters and songwriter Sammy Cahn, born on the Lower East Side. Best known for such movie-song hits as “Three Coins in a Fountain” and “All the Way” and “Call Me Irresponsible” and “Second Time Around,” Sammy along with Julie Styne wrote six songs for the 1947 film It Happened in Brooklyn. In the film, Danny (Frank Sinatra) has just been discharged from the army, and the first thing he does upon returning home is grab a taxi and head for the Brooklyn Bridge. He runs to the walkway, removes his hat, and in a tender love song sings to “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Like the folks you meet on
Like to plant my feet on the Brooklyn Bridge
What a lovely view from
Heaven looks at you from the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Some of the lyrics tell how sad those of us are in Manhattan because the bridge is Brooklyn’s, yet in the scene from the movie Sinatra sings the entire song with Lower Manhattan in the background. But despite to which borough it belongs the bridge is truly for us all, for the song concludes with the sweet lines, “You’ll miss her most when you roam/ Because you’ll think of home/ The good old Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Christopher Street”

Opening on Broadway in 1953, Wonderful Town is a musical set in 1935 that follows two sisters from Ohio who travel to New York City for love and fortune. Based on the play My Sister Eileen by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, the musical opens with a tour guide leading sightseers through Greenwich Village while singing “Christopher Street” written, as are all the songs in Wonderful Town, by Leonard Bernstein. Though the songs lack the passion and power Bernstein would later find in West Side Story, the opening number is a fun, bouncy little panorama of Christopher Street in particular but the Village in general. “My, what trees/ Smell that air/ Painters and pigeons in Washington Square.”
Greenwich Village has always been New York’s answer to Montmartre, a place for writers and artists and musicians before, after, or instead of Paris, and this musical captures that naïve wonder. The lyrics were written by Betty Comden  and Adolph Green, and the musical was based on the play inspired from a collection of short stories by Ruth McKenney published in 1938. Only the last two stories have anything directly to do with New York–“What charm, what grace/ poets and peasants on Waverly Place”—but those two became the basis for the hit show that won five Tony awards, including Best Musical, had a Broadway revival in 2003, and still remains a popular show for high school productions. The song today has meanings never intended when first composed over sixty years ago: “Life is gay, life is sweet,/ interesting people on Christopher Street.”

“Up On the Roof”

Though not specifically about Downtown, “Up on the Roof” by The Drifters is one of the greatest city songs ever written. Called Tar Beach on hot summer days, New York City rooftops have always been a place where we can “get away from the hustling crowd/ And all that rat-race noise down in the street.”
Written by the then husband and wife team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King (their break-through hit was “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”) and released at the end of 1962, the song was an instant hit and added to The Drifters’ other great New York songs like “Broadway” (“they say the neon lights are bright…”) and “Under the Boardwalk” (“on a blanket with my baby is where I’ll be”). A product of the creativity once heard throughout the hallways and staircases of the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway (described as “the most important generator of popular songs in the Western world”), the song has been performed by many singers including Laura Nyro, Neil Diamond, James Taylor, Ike and Tina Turner, and even Clifford of The Muppets. No matter if you live uptown or downtown, Brooklyn, the Bronx, or any American city, few songs have captured the urban romantic vision as this song has:

“When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space
On the roof, it's peaceful as can be
And there the world below can't bother me
Up on the roooof.”

“Talkin’ New York”

As a teenager out in the Midwest I’d been hearing other people doing Dylan until one day “Like a Rolling Stone” came on the juke box in the student union. Never heard anything like it, so I went to the record store and bought the only Dylan album it had: A Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, with that great photo of him and Suze Rotolo walking a snowy Jane Street, and Dylan would forever be linked in my mind with New York City. The first album he cut, Bob Dylan, released in 1962 by Columbia (after the folksinger’s label Vanguard rejected him for being too derivative), had only two original songs, one was “Song to Woody” for the ailing, inspirational Woody Guthrie, and the other “Talkin’ New York.” It is similar in tempo and rhyme to his more familiar “Talkin’ World War III Blues” (“I was down in a sewer with some little lover/ when I peeked out from a manhole cover/ wonderin’ who turned the lights on”), and it sounds much like it with his guitar and harmonica and that distinct voice (“Every time I hear myself sing,” he said, “I want to run and hide.”)
“Talkin’ New York” tells his story of coming to the city to be a folk singer: “I swung on to my old guitar /Grabbed hold of a subway car/And after a rocking, reeling, rolling ride/I landed up on the downtown side: /Green witch Village.” He found a job “In one of them coffee-houses on the block” singing and blowing his harmonica “for a dollar a day,” and then, like many of his wise-cracking lines of those early songs, he headed “out for the western skies/So long New York /Howdy, East Orange.”

“Washington Square”

Of all my stacks of 45s I played on my sister’s portable stereo (like a pink suitcase that opened to a turntable with hinged speakers on each side) none was played more times than “Washington Square” by the Village Stompers. I can still see that black vinyl disk with the yellow “Epic” label and the hole in the middle for either a spindle or those plastic things that fit into the hole: do those have a name?
The Village Stompers were a Greenwich Village Dixieland group consisting of Dick Brady, Don Coates, Mitchell May, Ralph Casale, Frank Hubbell, Lenny Pogan, Al McManus, and Joe Muranyi, but their biggest hit was an instrumental in a folk-dixie style entitled “Washington Square” composed by Bobb Goldsteinn who for years had been peddling his songs along Tin Pan Alley on West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Released in 1963, the catchy, tinny banjo tune reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart and #1 on Adult Contemporary Chart, nominated for two Grammy Awards, and, incredibly, remained the bestselling single in Japan until Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” 19 years later. Remakes were done by Percy Faith, Spike Jones, Andre Kostelanetz, and Lawrence Welk, but nothing was better than that banjo, then the tambourine, the honky-tonk horns coming in with the bass and snare drum in the background as the beat grew louder and we dreamed of one day walking those streets of Greenwich Village.

“Downtown”

In those first fragile, tentative years after the Twin Towers fell, a hit song from nearly four decades earlier received commercial air-time so that perhaps its melancholy yet hopeful lyrics and life-affirming melody would bring people back downtown. Though originally meant for The Drifters but sung by Petula Clark who promised her lyrics for the unfinished song would match its melody, “Downtown” was released initially in the UK in October of 1964. Written by Tony Hatch during his first visit to New York, the song quickly rose to #2; The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” was #1. But aired in the US a few months later, the song reached #1 on the charts, primarily because of the heartfelt singing of that adorable British girl with that sweet voice and such proper pronunciation, as well as the back-ups sung by a three girl group from Liverpool known as The Breakaways, who also sang on another Petula hit single, “I Know a Place.”
Petula sang “Downtown” on The Dean Martin Show in 1967 with a cheesy depiction of the Manhattan skyline for a backdrop, but not even the hokey extras dancing around her –guys in tight suits, girls with their hair styled in a bubble—could deter our hopes that downtown we might find “someone who is just like you” and that she might even be Petula: “so maybe I’ll see you there/ we can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares and go/ downtown, things will be great when you’re downtown/ everything’s waiting for you.

“Chelsea Girls”

Beautiful, adored, troubled, exotic, and tragic finally, the singer/actress/writer Nico was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne during World War II. At seven and a half minutes long, her “Chelsea Girls” is a slow, mournful, simple ballad of the tragic girls in the Chelsea Hotel. Room numbers, first names, sexual fetishes, drugs of choice, Nico takes no prisoners: “Here they come now/ See them run now /Here they come now/ Chelsea Girls.”
Having starred in Warhol’s film of the same name and with a cameo role in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Nico was involved with Morrison, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, and to whom Dylan wrote and gave “I’ll Keep It with Mine.” She released her first album Chelsea Girls in 1967. The title song has only a background guitar beneath Nico’s odd, faintly accented voice, then there’s the strings and that eerie, sensual flute.

Dropout, she's in a fix,
Amphetamine has made her sick
White powder in the air
She's got no bones and can't be scared

Nico was a hit at CBGB’s in 1980 when I first heard her; my girlfriend at the time was German and took us to that long, narrow, dingy club on Bowery just a few steps uptown from East First Street where I lived. Later Nico appeared regularly at the Mudd Club way downtown on White Street; with works of Keith Haring on the walls and a bathroom for both men and women, it was the alternative to the glitz of Studio 54. But like too many artists, and musicians in particular, Fate doomed Nico: after kicking heroin and turning to a healthy regimen of good food and exercise, she died in a freak bicycle accident in Italy in 1988.

“Houston Street Thursday Afternoon”

Running from the East River to the Hudson, one of Downtown’s broad boulevards and “Zero” Street in the legendary and still controversial Grid Plan from 1811, Houston Street, at least on Thursday, is the setting of a jazz piece by legendary vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. A cut from the sensual, provocative album View From the Inside released on the Blue Note label, “Houston Street on Thursday Afternoon” —like the best loving-making—is smooth, tingling, filled with both yearning and allure. I had just moved to East First Street when the album was released in 1976 and often gazed onto Houston Street from my kitchen windows in the back for the next twenty-four years either anxious for her arrival or smoking an after-love cigarette into the night. And while this happened not always on Thursdays, life there was on lucky days and nights the same sexy, tantalizing satisfaction found in this laid-back jazz piece by perhaps the greatest of jazz vibraphonists, floating “like a raft in a tranquil stream” as it has been described, with Emanuel Boyd on sax, Larry Nash on piano, James Leary III on bass, and Eddie Marshall on drums. At six and a half minutes, the piece carries us along on a journey of desire.
Awarded the Jazz Fellowship Award from the National Endowments for the Arts in 1982, Bobby Hutcherson catches us as the best of music does from the first captivating notes of “Houston Street Thursday Afternoon.” And if that opening wail of the saxophone, the soft back-beat on drums, the underlining bass and the pandering notes on the vibraphone don’t get ‘cha…but no way; you’re from Downtown.

“Downtown Train”

With a voice described by music critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car,” Tom Waits is more often known for his own songs sung by others. He was born in California, so I suppose Springsteen’s more famous rendition of Waits’ “Jersey Girl” can be tolerated, and though Rod Stewart’s popular version of “Downtown Train” does sound clearer it lacks the passion and grit its composer brings to it.
Waits once said New York is a “big ship with the water on fire,” and his song “Downtown Train” is a love song as much to downtown as to the girl he sings to: “Outside another yellow moon/ Punched a hole in the nighttime, yes/ I climb through the window and down the street/ Shining like a new dime.” Appearing on his 1985 album Rain Dogs, his voice with all the grovel and allure of the Lower East Side, the song is filled with passion and yearning: “Will I see you tonight/ On a downtown train/ All of my dreams just fall like rain/ All upon a downtown train.”
Hard to place in a category, part rock and roll, part blues, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the Waldorf Astoria just last year. "They say I have no hits and that I'm difficult to work with,” he said during his acceptance speech, then added, “like it's a bad thing."

“Delancey Street”

Though born in Brooklyn, Dana Dane (aka Dana McLeese) raps with a noticeable English accent, a left-over/imitation, perhaps, of Slick Rick (who was English) when they were in the group Kangol Crew. Dane’s song “Cinderfella Dana Dane” peaked at #11 in 1987 though he hasn’t released an album since ’95. He ran a boutique in the city for a time, published a novel entitled Numbers in 2009 (Ballantine/Random House), and hosts the old school hip-hop radio show “backspin” on Sirius.
Recorded in 1986, “Delancey Street” opens with a mock version of what we hear on the intercom when a subway blasts into a station. He’s probably coming into Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge and getting out at Delancey, the first stop. With a beat and attitude like the opening song of the TV show Prince of Bel-Air, “Delancey Street” is a bouncy, playful little rap (“I'll make you tickle, make your butt wiggle/ You'll tell your friends, and they'll chuckle and giggle”) about going to “Delancey Street/ where clothes are bought and people meet.” Three girls approach him, one white, one black, and one Chinese. At first they flirt, then pull out guns and demand his gold chains, his Gucci shades, his Vuitton jacket, even his Bally’s. Dana runs to Orchard Street but they’re already waiting for him, so he gives in, but when he opens his jacket “Printed on my shirt, yes, there's bold and plain/ ‘I’m not the one, the Rapper Dana Dane.’ ”
Now the girls know it’s him, and if you’re not hip to what happens next I’m not telling. And I’m not kidding.

“La Vie Boheme”

Set in the Life Café on East 11th Street and featuring the entire cast initially sitting at—then dancing around and on—a table, “La Vie Boheme” is an energetic, panoramic number from the long-running 1993 Broadway smash Rent. Based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème that opened a century before and heavily influenced in style by the rock-opera Hair, Jonathan Larson’s musical follows a group of friends living in the East Village in the late 1980s and struggling with their dreams, relationships, diseases, addictions, and society. Though a number not as renowned as “Seasons of Love” which, too, is sung by the entire ensemble, “La Vie Boheme” lies at the heart of the story, expressing the joys and passions of these artistic young people living on society’s edge and so capturing the independent spirit of bohemia. “To days of inspiration… making Something out of nothing/ The need to express/ To communicate,/ To going against the grain….”
Sung while orders for food are given to the waiter (“So that's five miso soup, four seaweed salad, three soy burger dinners”), the song celebrates the values of the group: “to no absolutes… to choice, To the Village Voice…. To Emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion /Creation, masturbation, Compassion, to fashion, to passion when it's new…To Bisexuals, trisexuals…Carcinogens, hallucinogens” as well as “ecstasy…marijuana” and many of the artists who inspired them: “To Sontag, to anything taboo, Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage, Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes….”
As dazzling dance occurs throughout the song which ends in a life-affirming shout of “Viva La Vie Boheme!” this song is a celebration of the bohemian life-style which, in the history of New York, has always flourished in some neighborhoods downtown.

“My Little Shirtwaist Fire”

Two years ago while I was at work on a Villager article about the books and poems that tell of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, my then fourteen-year-old daughter casually asked me, “Do you know Rasputina’s song about it?”
I knew neither the song nor Rasputina, but Lily did not roll her eyes or laugh incredulously but rather found something on her ipod and gave me an earbud so we could share.
I liked it. Hard-driving strings (cellos, I later learn) and electric drums. At first I didn’t get it or listen close enough (“Once it started/ The frail and fainthearted/ Just withered to the floor”) but then that chorus hits with a crash of a cymbal: “The terrible flames of / All that remains of/ My Little Shirtwaist Fire.”
The New York-based band known as Rasputina has been recording since 1992, and while many members of it leave and quickly are replaced, its soul, the strongest cello and her tender/outraged vocals, is Melora Creager. Her work is unconventional, labeled as Goth among other inaccurate tags, with a rare, alluring, and admirable attraction to history and social issues. In “My Little Shirtwaist Fire” is the vision, sympathy, and anger of a young woman at what happened because of greed and carelessness to so many young women a century ago.

“Such a sweet face / Trapped in a staircase / By the smell of her own burning hair.”

The horrible event that the song hallows haunted me with additional terror once I had my own daughter. Now she’s the age of the age of so many who perished on that late afternoon in early spring of 1911, and that my Lily knew and liked and turned me on to this song both made me proud and more fearful.

            “Yes, we're burning can you help us please?
            Yes, we're begging, we're on bended knees.”

“Lost on Bleecker Street”

Nowhere in Manhattan can you hear more fine music, and for free if you’re stingy, than on a nice day in Central Park. Near Bethesda Fountain Arlen Oleson plays dulcimer, Meta Epstein nearby on the harp (even when she’s resting the breeze makes sound on the strings), and along the Mall, Ralph U. Williams swings on sax. In nearly every tunnel someone’s playing, and playing well, and all these musicians have their cases open for loose change or a waded dollar bill, their self-made CDs for sale.
Known as The Guitar Man in Central Park, David Ippolito for years has been strumming his acoustic guitar along the western shore of the boating lake, singing Dylan, Guthrie, James Taylor, Harry Chapin, “American Pie,” and The Beatles. He also writes and performs his own songs, among them the mournful, searching “Lost on Bleecker Street” in which a young man “cannot face the emptiness you live with everyday,” so he “put[s] a guitar in its case,/ leave your one room hiding place/ and go downtown to where you/ sing and play all night.”
No musician attracts a larger or more loyal audience than David; he is engaging, funny, buys hot dogs for the crowd and takes requests: I’ve been there when newlyweds arrive and he serenades them. “Lost on Bleecker Street” is on his 2000 CD It’s Just Us though he has several others, has performed at Symphony Space uptown and at the Red Lion in the Village. Unhappily the dictatorial Central Park Conservancy is cracking down on all music in the Park, even, ironically, in Strawberry Fields, A similar outrage is occurring in Washington Square, but if we raise our voices loud enough then perhaps there won’t be a day when the music died.

“The Rising”

Since he was a skinny kid dreaming of New York from the other side of the Hudson River, Bruce Springsteen has written great rock and roll about our city: “It’s So Hard to be a Saint in the City,” “New York Serenade,” “Incident on 57th Street,” “Out in the Streets,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” and “Jungleland” to name a few.  But his 12th album, released in 2002 and the first in years with his beloved E Street Band entitled The Rising, was primarily both a powerful eulogy and a cry of healing after the attacks on September 11th.  Although the song “My City of Ruins” was written about Asbury Park, it took on new meaning after the Towers fell, and his “Empty Sky” is a desperate cry of what we lost (“I woke up this morning/ to an empty sky”). “You’re Missing” is about someone whose “house is waiting for you to walk in but you’re missing”), and “Nothing Man” is told by a firefighter killed that day (“my brave young life forever changed in a misty cloud of pink vapor”). The most heart-wrenching of all, “Into the Fire” tells of a firefighter’s widow: “I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher, up the stairs, into the fire.”
The album’s title song “The Rising” is a haunting, hard-driving spirit of loss and endurance (“Sky of blackness and sorrow…Sky of longing and emptiness…sky of blessed life”), written and performed passionately by one of us who has remained filled with conscience, commitment, and good ole’ rock ‘n roll.

“Ludlow Street”

We first heard the beautiful and haunting songs of Suzanne Vega when she was singing at the Cornelia Street Café. Her “Luka,” told from the point of view of an abused child (“Yes I think I’m okay/ Walked into the door again”), was her breakout hit from her first album (weren’t they still called ‘albums’ back then?), Solitude Standing, released in 1987. Another track on the same album was “Tom’s Diner” which she often does acapella, and its setting is Tom’s Restaurant at Broadway and 112th Street, more popularly known from the sitcom Seinfeld. Vega was raised in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side, and her most New York-centric album Beauty and Crime appeared in 2007 with such tracks as  “New York is a Woman” where we “Look down and see her ruined places/ Smoke and ash still rising to the sky.” In her “Edith Wharton’s Figurines” we “See the portrait come to life/ See the vanity behind/ ‘Cause in the struggle for survival/ Love is never blind.” And there’s the tender, heart-aching song “Ludlow Street.”

“When I go back to Ludlow Street/ I find each stoop and doorway's incomplete/ Without you there…”

Though she often sings playing only an acoustic guitar and with a definite folk music style, this song is electrified with a strong back-beat on drums. “Love is the only thing that matters,” the song opens, “Love is the only thing that's real.” But the song is not to a lost lover but rather her own brother who died of alcohol abuse; Suzanne often accompanied him to rehab sessions on Ludlow Street, and only in the song’s final verse does she mention his name: Tim.