Aaron Burnett: cool new subway/street musician

As someone who rides around on the New York subway system pretty much every day, I hear a lot of subway music. Musicians are constantly arriving in the city from somewhere else and many of them want to start playing without having to sell some club owner on how many drinking/paying customers they’ll be able to attract. Some of the more fearless ones figure out that simply setting up in the subway and playing can be a great way to build a sound while making about what you’d make at your shitty job.

And so we get the diverse world of subway music, which most of us happily ignore. Yet the other day I had a pleasantly startling experience with it. I was walking through the 14th St. A/C/E station wanting to transfer to the L, dog tired and needing a beer, when I hear this very abstract simple figure played over and over again on a sax. “Wow,” I think. “Something about that tone is so conscious, so creative, so grabbing-me-by-the-balls.”

So I turn around and check the guy out. He’s wearing a black hoodie and jeans, looks just like the typical subway rider. And then he poured out this stream of Coltrane channeling Bartok that really blew my mind, especially when he pursed his lips and played an actual chord on the sax, a painful squeal like elephants being tasered behind the scenes at the circus that was simultaneously as beautiful as a dewdrop on a cherry blossom. This, I would later learn, was Aaron Burnett.

One day later, I was happy to see the same guy setting up with a drummer at the Bedford L station in Williamsburg around eleven PM. I was there with my friend Al and we stood around to watch. Some local sleepyhead was in Aaron’s face right from the beginning, telling them they couldn’t make noise and that “A lot of people in Williamsburg don’t like music.”

Way to get the crowd rooting for you, man. People were literally shouting from numerous local rooftops for the little group to start playing. And so then they did.

With a snap of the snare drum and a squeal of the sax, the two players suddenly started peeling off blisteringly fast drum ‘n’ bass. I must say, only in the presence of Jojo Mayer have I seen a purely acoustic band create such hot music in this genre. And Mayer tends to play a little too closely to the book, a little on the cold side, whereas this was full of energy.

Five minutes into it, about a hundred people were standing around, camera flashes strobing and video cameras sucking up the vibes. Some local Polish kid in office wear came stumbling drunk out of the subway and started dancing like some kind of sexed-up go-go dancer, at one point going so far as to hump a nearby ATM machine. Aaron started pulling those sick chords out of the saxophone, and the crowd was literally screaming. The scene was openly more fun than the scene in any nearby club, and it was free. The path from the curb to the subway had been instantaneously transformed into something in between a fashion catwalk and a circus sideshow.

Such are life’s beautiful moments. A few minutes later, two donut-munching cops pulled up, responding to the complaints of the original guy who didn’t want the band to play. “You got a permit?” the first cop said, and the music ground to a halt. A boo went up from the crowd, but the cops weren’t going to play villain. They told the band not to stop but to move it to McCarren Park, which they did.

In short, Aaron Burnett put on the best impromptu street party music I’ve seen since, maybe Rude Mechanical Orchestra at the Mermaid Parade two years ago. But Burnett has a singular vision and an energy that’s different from the marching band scene, harder and more intellectual with far-out influences like Schoenberg and Squarepusher. Keep it up, Mr. Burnett. We’re glad to have you in Brooklyn.