I came across this busker in a Times Square subway station surrounded by several battery powered dolls gyrating to his music. Fortunately I had my Sony PCM-D50 along to capture a few minutes of his performance, and a few dollars for his tip bucket. The scene was surreal and difficult to describe, but enchanting never-the-less.
He was an older gentleman wearing an over sized beige trench coat hunched over a Yamaha electric organ playing an uptempo rendition of La Vie En Rose. The dolls were similar to those annoying dancing Santas, but among them there was a gyrating saxophone player and a creepy, blond, female, dancing doll with “sound, moving head, hands and buttocks”, as described on the web and shown here.
Battery Powered Dancing Dolls
This recording from the New York City subway system includes the classic and familiar chimes to indicate that the sliding doors are about to close. Newer cars have a spoken message, “stand clear of the closing doors please”. The doors open and close at a couple of stops. There’s quite a bit of talking going on in the car along with the track noise, electric motor acceleration, and screeching brakes. If you listen carefully you can hear Ray telling an embarrassing story about how he once fell over onto another passenger as the car took off. Sorry, Ray!
Sunday afternoon on February 8, 2009 it was fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit in Manhattan, so we took a stroll through Soho en route to brunch with our gracious hosts Ray and his lovely wife Nicole. Street vendors were out in full force selling paintings, photographs, rugs, pottery, and all sorts of other sundries. Here’s thirty-four seconds of our walk illustrating a variety of activities going on in the area. 
Here’s a nice one minute and twelve seconds long segment with very little talking from an eight minute recording inside a New York City taxi cab. I was in the taxi with my friends Simone Giuliani and Benjamin Montag on the way to Nublu from Simone’s studio where we had been listening to each others music and catching up after not seeing each other for over a year. You can hear rough roads, typical New York cabbie lead footed acceleration, the muffled sound of traffic outside the cab, and my quip at the end in response to Simone saying he was tired as well, “my [lack of] energy is bringing you down”.
I managed to capture most of both of the Keston and Westdal sets at Nublu last Saturday on my Sony PCM-D50. The recording is pretty chatty, but that’s about what you’d expect in a jam packed small venue like Nublu. Although the mix and quality is bad, these kind of recordings are good for gathering ideas. You never know what might come out of a late night, or rather early morning, jam session. This particular jam started sometime during our second set, shortly after three in the morning, with a loop of drums and synth bass Nils put together that Graham O’Brien (drums) and I joined in on.