Vijith Assar

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

See also: Cast In Concrete #6: Scott Stenten And The Sound Of Two Hands Tapping (On A Guitar)

Vijith Assar

Who: Scottish Octopus
Where: intersection of Lafayette Street and 8th Street, in front of the cube sculpture
When: 11/17/2012, about 5pm.

Things didn't go so well when I tried to record Andrew Forbes a few weeks ago over near NYU. A second expected bagpiper didn't show up, whooshing wind noises made my recording unusable, and there was also one unpleasant incident wherein a particularly nasty gust made off with a big chunk of the money in his case, forcing his enchanted onlookers to break free of their trances and run around trying to gather up the fluttering bills. I gave up pretty quickly, and then he disappeared into the wind himself, so to speak.

See Also:
- Cast In Concrete Archive

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

Who: Lenna Pierce, d.b.a. Meaner Pencil

When: November 1st, 11:30pm

Where: C line, Nostrand Avenue station, Manhattan-bound platform

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

I first scouted out Scott Stenten for this column late last fall, when the chilly weather cost me three solid evenings wandering around midtown and the East Village looking for musicians, who apparently had all already packed it in for the winter by then. But Stenten was bravely soldiering on into the cold; by the time we caught up again last week, that situation had completely reversed, and we found ourselves in the sweltering passageway between Grand Central and the Graybar Building.

Using a doubleneck acoustic—two identical steel six-strings, with additional electronics behind a detachable flap on the back—Stenten plays entirely via an unusual two-handed fretboard tapping technique. It's sort of like Eddie Van Halen's embellishing trick, except that it's applied at all times to create fully independent chord and melody voices for each hand, much like a pianist.

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

I will ride hard for Prospect Park even under normal circumstances, so when you also plop a great band down in the middle of it, you've probably made my week. Upon spying an informal jam session unfolding beneath a tree, I immediately dashed back to my nearby apartment to pick up the recording gear, which is why here you're hearing some delightful new condenser mics that I usually don't bother to bring along when I'm just aimlessly wandering. By the time I made it back the band had relocated a few yards due west, since in the intervening half hour a bird had taken a shit on guitarist Jordan Shapiro's fretboard. This took him a while to clean up.

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records the musical offerings of New York City's street musicians.

I guess all the musicians in this city are better about checking the forecasts than I am, because a sizable loop through the East Village last week just left me sweaty and exhausted and still empty-handed. I gave up on the wanderlust and just made a beeline for the reliable Washington Square Park, where the Sistine Criminals inaugurated this enterprise a year ago. And what do you know! In the exact same spot, just in front of the statue on the western side of the park, I found another group likewise commanding a crowd's attention.

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records the musical offerings of New York City's street musicians.

Who: Zack Orion
When: 8/16, about 11:30pm
Where: Bedford Avenue L train platform

It's been a very long time since I've seen anybody pull off the one-man band thing quite like this guy—his ability sucks you in from all the way up by the turnstiles. Right foot stuck to a tambourine which is substituting quite effectively for the snare crack, left foot perched on a kick pedal that's aimed backwards at the suitcase/drum he's sitting on, harmonica around his neck ready to go for the times when he's not singing, and all this still leaves both hands free for the banjo. Imagine my surprise when I ambled up alongside him and saw the name on the CDs he was hocking—Zack Orion. I vaguely recognized it from the time I spent down in Virginia, where we sort of traveled in the same circles without ever actually meeting.

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records the musical offerings of New York City's street musicians.

Scorcher of a day out at the Union Square Greenmarket, which is the best I can do by way of explanation for my complete and utter snark failure here. When I was about halfway through recording these white dudes singing an Indian devotional chant, a husky and apparently quite confused West African fella approached me to ask, "Hey, what you believe in?"

Now, granted, I am a full-blooded Indian guy, and there was even a phase of my life during which music like this was a constant background presence—house parties with other suburban Indian families where the adults would sing this stuff in the living room while the kids played NES in the basement, and then all the above parties would eat tandoori chicken and aloo parathas together. But here I was standing off to the side, wasn't singing, and was wearing a polo shirt, sneakers, and a considerably more conventional haircut.

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records the musical offerings of New York City's street musicians.

Quite the debatably fortuitous beginning to this enterprise, getting run over by a mobile mariachi quartet's accordionista the moment I jumped on the subway out by Prospect Park. But they declined to participate because they didn't have their uniforms, which seemed to me a very good reason to refuse. So instead I was off to Washington Square.

If you're lucky, Greg "Torch" Sgrulloni's drums will pretty much rule the park when you arrive, jumping out over the fountain and right through the crowds milling about with their ice creams or homework or whatever it is the NYU kids do out there. What could otherwise probably pass for a straightforward jazz head with a slight Middle Eastern modal flavor gets warped into a nerve-wracking monument to paranoia by jittery mile-a-minute jungle breakbeats that you'd assume were programmed specifically to sound inhuman if you weren't right there watching it all unfold from a park bench.