Juba and his hammer dulcimer

There's a winding passageway that separates the platforms for the 6 and E trains at the 53rd and Lexington subway station. The Thursday I met Juba the crowd was hustling with typical impatience down the long corridor and I was in the middle of it getting my shoulders bumped and my heels kicked. With a few hours to kill between work up in Harlem and a gig at Matchless in Brooklyn I was neither in a rush nor bothered by the clumsy mass of people surrounding me.

His music was barely audible from the far end of the passageway, but as we came closer it grew louder than the White Stripes song rattling on my ipod. I turned off the rock and roll and let the mysterious reverberating sound guide me along the last yards of my transfer. When Juba finally came into sight it looked like he had created an eddy in a river of commuters. The passageway ended, the walls drew apart and off to the left there were people wandering casually in the area where he had set up his hammer dulcimer. Some were gazing at the tile mosaic on the wall and listening to his music, others stood in front of him watching the mallets bounce off the strings on his unfamiliar instrument. I got the feeling that somehow the complexity of his music and the intrigue of his unique instrument allowed them to discover for the first time the detail in these walls which they had hurried past so many times.

He had a recorded percussion track piped through a speaker at his feet. The percussion, I learned when I spoke with him between songs, was actually a recording of the percussionist from his band, Mecca Bodega. So I attached the microphone to my ipod and asked if he wouldn't mind my recording his next song.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO JUBA AND HIS HAMMER DULCIMER AT 53RD AND LEXINGTON