As he beats on his upside-down buckets with a pair of well-worn drumsticks, street musician Mark Johnson seems nearly oblivious to passersby.
The urgency of his music and expression of joy on his face suggest a star turn in Orchestra Hall rather than an impromptu performance on North Michigan Avenue.
Yet once Johnson puts down his sticks and surveys the scene, he’s all too aware that he’s not exactly welcome on the glittering street where Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and other tony stores sell their wares.
“I’ve had people spit in my (collection) bucket or put their fingers in their ears when they go by,” says Johnson, who has played Chicago’s streets for more than a decade. “They just don’t always respect the street musician.”
That’s putting it mildly. Though itinerant street performers never have been as welcome in this city as they have been in New Orleans’ French Quarter, New York’s subways, London’s Covent Garden, Paris’ Metro or Havana’s old city center, matters may soon get worse.
Even if the best of these street players have collaborated with the likes of Junior Wells, Koko Taylor, Quincy Jones, Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler and the Chi-Lites, their days of wandering the streets in search of a few coins may be quickly coming to a close.
An ordinance introduced in the City Council earlier this month is the most restrictive in more than a decade, acknowledges its sponsor, Ald. Burton Natarus (42nd), who has been waging legislative battle with the roving musicians in his downtown ward since the mid-1980s. (After public hearings that are still to be scheduled, City Council will vote on the measure before July 7.)
And though the proposed regulations fill six pages (see adjoining story for details), their thrust is unmistakably clear: Keep the street musicians quiet, out of the way and on the move, particularly when pedestrian traffic is high: lunchtime, rush hour, evenings, weekends and holidays.
“A peddler is a peddler. A (street) musician is a form of peddling. In other words, you’re peddling your wares, you’re peddling your music for a fee, a voluntary fee. . . . And what we’re going to do is to insist that they conduct themselves like the peddlers do,” says Natarus, who is determined to regulate the musicians at least as rigorously as the city regulates street vendors.
Historically and culturally speaking, however, street musicians always have been much more than mere peddlers hawking second-hand trinkets. Even in the hostile climate of Chicago, the old Maxwell Street market was a cauldron of incendiary blues playing by the likes of Muddy Waters, David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Robert Nighthawk.
Now, as then, however, life as a street musician in Chicago is precarious at best.
“Some days you make $3, some days you can make $35 in an hour,” says Aaron Dodd, a tuba player who works along Michigan Avenue and years ago recorded with Mayfield, Butler, the Chi-Lites and other local stars.
“Once, outside Orchestra Hall, a guy gave me a $50 bill, but that only happened once,” adds Dodd, a veteran member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians who in the past has been cited in the prestigious Down Beat Critics Poll.
“It’s tough out here. The cops keep coming by to check my permit, even though they know I have one after the first couple times I’ve showed it. Some of the stores don’t let me play nearby and chase me away, even though I’m supposed to be allowed to play anywhere.”
For $50 a year, any street performer can (and must) obtain a permit, which allows him to perform publicly within certain restrictions. Essentially, he or she can perform “in any public area, but only between the hours of 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. on Sundays through Thursdays and 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays,” according to current law, with particular restrictions on blocking public ways, interfering with special events (such as Grant Park music festivals) and so forth.
Nevertheless, on a recent weekday afternoon, saxophonist Michael Young was making a few dollars at the northeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Erie Street.
“There definitely are positives and negatives to working the streets in Chicago,” says Young, who played with Junior Wells for several years before the bluesman’s death last year. “I can make $150 in four hours or $12 in eight hours. You never know what you’re going to get.
“Then you hear complaints from people who live in the high-rises: One lady complained that she couldn’t hear her Pavarotti recording while I was playing.
“But what people don’t always realize is that we’re musicians, too. We’re not beggars,” adds Young, who played under the legendary Capt. Walter Dyett at DuSable High School and has worked with Koko Taylor. When he’s not playing on the streets, Young performs in various hotel and party bands.
“We’re not begging, we’re working,” he adds. “We’re not homeless, we’re regular Chicagoans. I’ve got a house and kids I take care of. And I make a living playing my horns.”
Young’s imploring sound and considerable technique would win ovations in any Chicago blues club. As he pours a great deal of soul into “The Shadow of Your Smile” and “My Favorite Things” (a tune associated with one of his heroes, John Coltrane), it’s not difficult to imagine Young someday achieving the recognition he deserves.
But work is always scarce in a city that overflows with talented players, so Young has been working the streets off and on for eight years.
What listeners sometimes forget, however, is that Young and his musical brethren represent an age-old tradition that dates to at least the 1st Century, when a long-forgotten artist named Dioscuris of Samos created a mosaic of street performers for Cicero’s villa wall in Italy.
In 19th and 20th Century America, street players have done no less than create entire forms of musical expression.
“If you look at New Orleans, it’s in the streets where important parts of musical history have taken place,” says Antonio Garcia, associate professor of music at Northwestern University and a Crescent City native.
“In fact, if not for all the musical activity in the streets of New Orleans, the music we now call jazz would have evolved differently and not nearly as richly. The streets gave birth to the brass band tradition in New Orleans and trained several generations of players who weren’t allowed a formal music education, often because they were black.”
Indeed, the parade bands that made a joyful noise throughout New Orleans at the turn of the century and the funeral bands that nobly ushered the deceased into another world were staffed mostly by illiterate players who laid the groundwork for the emergence of jazz and related musical forms.
From this maelstrom of sound came such performers as Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong, who first codified the language of jazz trumpetry.
New Orleans is not unique, however, for cities across the United States and around the world have nurtured street performers who turned self-styled sounds into art. Without the dirt streets of Hazelhurst, Rosedale, Clarksdale and other Mississippi Delta towns, Delta performers such as Charley Patton and Son House might never have developed the genre today called country blues. Without Beale Street in Memphis, improverished performers such as B.B. King might never have attained acclaim outside the Delta. And without Maxwell Street in Chicago, Southern bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and David “Honeyboy” Edwards might never have found a place to develop the electric blues that eventually would conquer the world.
Similarly, the street musicians of 19th Century Eastern Europe invented a lamenting, entrancing music today called klezmer, though modern listeners rarely hear it in its natural setting — outdoors.
Moreover, the honor roll of street musicians who have gone on to seduce millions of listeners is lengthy, including such formidable artists as Armstrong, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, blues singer-guitarist Corey Harris and Chicago R&B star R. Kelly.
But the struggle to be a street musician in Chicago has been more acute in the last two decades than in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s heyday of Maxwell Street. For performers, the problems began to mount in 1983, when the City of Chicago created an ordinance requiring a permit of street musicians, severely curtailing their activities and banning them from using any kind of amplification. Shortly thereafter, U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Aspen struck down several provisions of the law as unconstitutional, including the restrictions on using amplifiers. Since then, the city has amended existing ordinances with various restrictions.
Yet even Chicago has had a discernible ambivalence toward street performers.
While downtown residents often object to the decibel levels, theater-goers here (and across the country) have made hits of shows such as “Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk” (Broadway’s rhapsody to street music), “MADhattan” (a Las Vegas extravaganza starring bona fide street performers) and even the venerable “Porgy and Bess” (with its evocative array of street calls).
Audiences’ sustained interest in street music is apparent in other media, as well, as in film documentaries such as the recent “The Underground Orchestra” and last year’s VH-1 special “Behind the Music: Takin’ it to the Streets”; recordings such as the 1996 street-musicians CD “Street Dreams” (Clay Dog Records) and the 1993 CD “Satan and Adam Mother Mojo” (on Flying Fish); and a 1995 Street Musicians Festival at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Nevertheless, “I live on the 16th floor, and I don’t feel like having a concert in the middle of my living room,” protests one longtime resident of a North Michigan Avenue high-rise who asks that her name not be used.
Adds Kathy Cahill, who lives on the 69th floor of a skyscraper on East Delaware Avenue: “I must say, the music is beautiful, I really enjoy it, but I just don’t like it at all hours. I want to be able to turn it off. Believe it or not, we can hear it all the way up here.”
The sound also resonates below ground, where DePaul University music student Melissa Pruss plays her violin, in various subway stations.
“I’ve had a couple of bad situations with crazy people kicking my violin case or trying to steal my money, but in general, I love this work,” she says.
“The cops ticket me because I don’t play at the stations where we’re allowed to, but my case always has been dismissed without a fine. I’ve developed a pretty loyal audience. They ask to hear things like Pachelbel’s Canon or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and I’m glad to oblige.
“To me, it’s no different than playing in a concert hall.”
Still, the battle rages on, and if the last two decades are any indication, the newest City Council rulings are unlikely to settle it once and for all.
But it’s worth remembering that where great populations have gathered in cities — from New Orleans to Chicago and beyond — music inexorably has risen up from the streets and probably always will.
“Maybe if they don’t like the music downtown,” says Johnson, the street drummer, “they ought to live somewhere nice and quiet, like the suburbs.”
ON THE PROPOSED STREET PERFORMANCE ORDINANCE
Following are key assertions and provisions of Ald. Burton Natarus’ proposed ordinance on street musicians, with his comments on each. After public hearings that are still to be scheduled, a Chicago City Council vote on the measure is scheduled for July 9:
– Proposed ordinance: “Existing regulations governing street performances are not sufficient to protect residents and other occupants from the sometimes annoying, disturbing and even unhealthful effects of street performances.”
Natarus: “When I say unhealthful, I’m talking about the fact that I wear a hearing aid, and I think people are going to have to become more attuned to the fact that loud noise and loud music someday down the road is going to impair their hearing. There’s in particular one fellow who’s a drummer who often sets himself right across the street from Marshall Field’s and beats that drum, and I’m not at all sure that that’s healthy for people.”
– Proposed ordinance: “Street performances can cause safety hazards.”
Natarus: “I think they can cause safety hazards in the sense that people might be listening to the music and not pay attention to traffic. And I also think there are situations where somebody does attract a crowd and blocks traffic. . . . I think that’s a safety hazard.”
– Proposed ordinance: “(No person shall) generate any sound by any means so that (1) the sound pressure level on the public way measured at a distance of 10 feet or further from the source exceeds 80 decibels or is more than 10 decibels above the ambient noise level, or (2) the sound is (audible) louder than an average conversational level at a distance of 200 feet or more measured either horizontally or vertically from the point of generation.”
Natarus: “I don’t know how they’re really going to know (if they conform to these measurements). (But) I think this will be a clue to them that they’re going to have to tone down.”
– Proposed ordinance: “No performer or performing group may perform at the same location for more than two hours at a time. Once one performer or performing group stops playing at a given location, no other performer may perform at that location for a period of two hours after the first performer has stopped. . . .”
Natarus: The comings and goings of the performers “will be monitored by the police. I think it’s just going to be something that’s visual. A policeman will walk by — usually they’re on duty for six, seven hours — and he’ll look at his watch and say, `Look, you’ve been here (too long).’ We can’t put a meter there.”
– Proposed ordinance: “On State Street from Congress Parkway to Wacker Drive, performances are banned from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Mondays through Fridays; and from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays; and at all times between Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas.
“On North Michigan Avenue from the north side of the Chicago River to Oak Street, performances are banned from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Mondays through Thursdays; from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Fridays; all day Saturday; and all day Sunday until 5:30 p.m.; and at all times between Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas.”
Natarus: “If the hours are too strict, we may alter those. The purpose of the (upcoming) hearing is to determine whether or not an ordinance is feasible.
“Mainly, I don’t want them there early in the morning, and I don’t want them there late at night, and I have a particular aversion to them being there on Sunday.”
“(Thanksgiving to the day after Christmas) are the heaviest days, there are thousands and thousands of people, and you don’t want them (street musicians) interrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic.”
