In support of buskers. Consistent with all I've heard about the general mentality of the Ottawa powers-that-be:


The more minstrels the merrier
By Phil Jenkins, Citizen Special May 31, 2010 Be the first to post a comment
When I first moved back to Ottawa, in 1978, I made some walking money by busking on the ByWard Market. I had come from Liverpool, armed with a retailable accent and a twelve-string guitar, and I knew passable versions of half a dozen Beatles songs, so I played them on repeat for a couple of hours on a corner, counted the change in the guitar case and fed it to my growling stomach.

Most days I could see three or four fellow buskers elsewhere on the market, serenading the natives and the tourists with varying levels of talent and making a proportional income. The lucky minstrel who bagged the corner spot by the Lafayette tavern spent the day yo-yoing between pints and picking. Occasionally the chickens at the live animal stalls provided a clucking chorus and everybody, except me it seems, sang Neil Young songs. Neil Young is the patron saint of Canadian buskers.

Meanwhile, over on the Sparks Street mall, a crowd of dozens if not hundreds would gather round true entertainers of the calibre of Sneezy Waters and go into suspended animation. Most people walked away from such a show only a dollar or so lighter in the purse and feeling much better about their lives. The head scientists tell us that when listening to music the brain is firing in several places simultaneously. We really get off on music; it's like underfloor heating for the memory and subjective thinking.

Walking down Bank Street last week, I had the chance pleasure of stopping to listen to an unplugged quartet of buskers with an ABBA line-up, two of each gender, dressed in street-kid chic (all-black, spiked hair, cut-off leggings, cut-off jeans, baseball boots). They employed a banjo, guitar, hand percussion, and the lead singer had a small laptop computer resting on the palm just below eye-level showing her the lyrics. They sounded great, four-part harmony, which is what the gods listen to in their spare time, and quite rightly there was a good whack of loonies and toonies -- make that tuneies -- in their guitar case.

A nearby store owner told me that the week before at the same corner, on the small angled stage where some bank steps used to be, there was an Elvis, from the King's portly period, slightly balding but in good voice. Among his crowd was an older lady who paused to take both hands off her Zimmer and do a little jig. Get down, mama.

The tradition of the outdoor, unfettered entertainer/poet/newsbringer goes way way back, to the Greek rhapsodists and beyond; every culture has them, from the African griot to the Aborigine songliner.

The European notion of the minstrel, the accompanied, melodious poet, is a thousand years old, from the gleemen up to the present day busker. There was a minstrels' guild in Paris by 1321 and that Bank street quartet I enjoyed so much is their direct descendent, as is the one-armed gentleman guitarist outside the Bay on the ByWard, and the balladeers outside the Beaver Tails outlet on William Street. Minstrels are a vital part of city life, and the more the merrier, say I, even if they could use some new strings and a tuner.

In my minstrel days on the market, we were practising a largely unregulated craft; we were free-range troubadours but with City Hall being the regulation and revenue factory it is these days, with its habit of falling down flat on the big projects while grinding the healthy ones to a petty death, the simple act of singing in the street to your fellow citizens will cost you $200 in the tourist areas, and you have to audition before a panel of your musical inferiors.

Give it a break. For a brief while -- I played there myself in a duo called the Reincarnations -- there was organized music of a lunch-hour on the Sparks Street Mall, but some lawyers who were allergic to fun thought it was cutting into their concentration and billable hours, so they had it kyboshed. So it goes in this town, in a minor key.

If you can imagine the gentle melody of Dirty Old Town by Ewan MacColl playing in your head as you read the rest of this paragraph, here's what I'd like to see. Don't charge the buskers a cent to play on the corners; instead put a local noise pollution levy on every cellphone sold inside city limits and use the money to bring back music at Camp Fortune, outside the National Gallery, on Nepean point and on winterized bandstands throughout the city. Convert an old OC Transpo bus to a travelling show and drop off buskers at every shopping mall, particularly at the monstrosity that is the Centrum in Kanata, at noon and collect them at sunset. And to the buskers, I issue this challenge; like your calypso brothers and sisters in the Caribbean, bring back the topical protest songs and let them ring out to the choir of consuming citizens. Heck, I might even dust off my guitar case and head down to Lansdowne Perk, sorry, Park, and let them have a re-written "Big Yellow Taxi," "Hey, mister developer, put away that seven-storey condo," 20 times a day, and donate the proceedings to Heritage Ottawa to fight the good fight.

Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa writer.

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