Subway musicians

As I was coming home today from Robarts, I heard some amazing jazz/blues resonating around the station. I'm the type that tries to pay attention to subway musicians as much as possible - so I looked around for the band (I honestly thought it was more than one guy). Instead, it was one dude playing an eight string guitar. The bottom five strings were your standard EADGBE strings - but the top three strings were bass strings. The guy was playing guitar and bass... AT THE SAME TIME! He also had his foot in a tambourine and was tapping it to create some percussion sounds. I was very impressed. So much so that I actually just stood there as a train pulled in and let it pass, because I just had to finish listening to the song.

I also bought the CD he had in his guitar case. Good stuff - sits in the background SO well.

But the other thing I was observing as I let the train come and go was the rest of the people just walking past this guy playing one of the most interesting instruments I've seen and playing it pretty well as far as I could tell. It reminded me of an article I read about Joshua Bell playing his 3.5 million dollar Strad in front of a subway station in Washington D.C. I have to be honest, before I read that article, I had no idea who Joshua Bell was. But all the masses of people walking past this guy playing some pretty good jazz blues without even stopping to turn their heads made me wonder. I mean, some people don't like jazz... I can buy that (though I don't understand). But the whole time I was standing there, nobody even slowed down to listen. Everyone was just single mindedly focused on getting where they were going. Ok, maybe some people were late... I can buy that too. But still...........

By the way, the musicians name is Jason Crawford.