s p a c i n g : : : whose space is public space?

WORK: buskers
Sidewalk Blues

by Lindsay Gibb
photo by Matt O'Sullivan

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Walk down any main street in Toronto and you’re bound to encounter at least a couple of people trying to entertain the pedestrians scurrying past. For these performers it’s not like a band night at a local bar, they have no built-in, captive audience wanting to be entertained. It’s the busker’s job to lure a crowd. If he doesn’t, whose fault is it, the inattentive audience or the mediocre musician?

The answer is both. Professional curbside entertainers (like the folks at this past August’s Buskerfest on Front Street) are veritable ringleaders whose social magnetism lets them easily rake together a cheering crowd with pocketbooks a-bursting. For instance, punk magician Dylan Studebaker doesn’t sit back quietly waiting for people to admire his magic tricks. He draws attention to himself using his natural (and loud) showmanship, and keeps the audience by involving them in his David Blaine-esque magic while entertaining them with his sense of humour.

He puts the onus on himself to grab and keep the affections of Torontonians, but the majority of buskers are not of this breed. Most are solo musicians or small ensembles that place an empty case at their feet and simply depend on the kindness of strangers. And while we Torontonians will generally come through for these performers in a monetary sense (especially if they employ some interesting instrumentation), far too few of us seem inclined to stop and actually listen.

In Europe buskers are so well respected that tour guides often show them off to their passengers. Studebaker, who has taken his show on the road a number of times, has witnessed the difference, and the excitement in his voice gets even more hyper when he is asked about the response overseas. “If you date a girl in Europe and she takes you home her mom would say, ‘cool, he’s got a good job.’ Here it’s more like, ‘what, he’s a bum?’” Yet, most buskers are not homeless, rather they are determined, struggling artists who are on the streets to make money doing what they love, performing their chosen art for an audience.

The lack of admiration for buskers is not always the audience’s fault either. The ratio of good artists to bad is not always favourable. For every Michael McTaggart (better known as Subway Elvis, an Elvis impersonator from Tennessee who played on TTC property in the 1970s before it was legal to do so), Jeff Burke (a 26-year veteran of the bassoon who plays covers of Nirvana and Black Sabbath in subway stations and performs with bands from jazz to world-beat to hip-hop), and Graeme Kirkland (the legendary jazz drummer who used to draw crowds playing buckets outside the Rivoli) there are the guys who clink toy xylophones and acoustic guitar players who play bad renditions of Bob Dylan or The Beatles with no emotion whatsoever. Still, without any buskers in our public spaces the only free outdoor performers we would see would be those who are hired to play on that big slab of concrete at Yonge and Dundas. We would only be able to see “acceptable” forms of entertainment and, the bottom line is, entertainment in our public spaces would be owned by private interests.

Perhaps now is the time to give Toronto’s buskers our attention along with our pocket change. As corporate encroachment on our arts and our public spaces continues, the concept of musicians playing on our sidewalks for loonies is now as defiant as it is charming. For protest or pleasure, our mission as citizens is clear: let’s pause, whenever we can, and listen.

with files from Todd Harrison