Subway Musicians

New York is music. The city has a rhytm, a sound, a swing. At your first arrival you want to dance, because you're in New York! After spending some time in the city, you slowly discover each neighbourhood has its own melody, its own genre.
Times Square and its surroundings feels like a piece of Philip Glass, a busy, constantly repeating built up of sound, that sometimes seems to disappear for a moment, but that will return even louder than before. Chelsea sounds like the old Standards of Sinatra and Garland, swinging, longing, sometimes exited. Williamsburg is bursting of modern pop and the Upper West Side has a somewhat stiff opera sound. Bed-Stuy is of course rap. Rap 'n Roll.

Not only above ground, but also underneath, there is music. Everywhere. It's almost impossible to find a train station that hasn't a musician in it, who fills the narrow hallways with his voice or his instrument. Musicians, wanna-be musicians and true geniuses are performing everywhere, in the hope to earn some money. Some have other jobs to attend, others live from the life underground.

The subway musicians made the soundtrack of my travels through the city. On my way to work, the toothless Cuban and the melancholic music of his home country, would start my day in a special way. On my way back home, the two hipster boys and their happy songs would make me forget about my hunger, the drummer on 6th Ave and 14th st, whose sounds were hearable from afar, would fill up the train tubes all the way to Union Square and Joe, who regularly could be found at Metropolitan Station, didn't only fill my heart with his music, but, unknowingly, created even more love during a spontaneous jam session.

I filmed them, the subway musicians who give more color to New York. Hours of clips, of people perfroming their passion with love, are waiting to be edited into a story. And of course, I'm not the only one who sees them. The number of film makers, wanna-be film makers and geniuses that have just as much and even more material is countless. Although I'd rather be the only one to make a film about this subject (apart from Hedy Honigman who made the beautiful film The Underground Orchestra years ago), I realised that all the stories that are being filmed, together tell the real story. Or, at least, come close to the real story, that exists of all those different stories of musicians, listeners and travelers.

Two of the first musicians I filmed.


And this is a film about my New York subway friends