Crooning to a City in Transit

As his train thunders through the darkness beneath the city, the motorman feels in tune with the music of the Metro.

Jean-Michel Grandjean has absorbed the rhythms during 29 years driving Paris subway trains: the beat of the tracks, the wail of the warning siren, the sigh of the closing doors. He knows the flow of the crowds at the Concorde station, the furtive footwork of the drug dealers on the platform at Strasbourg Saint-Denis.

Grandjean, a veteran musician, has an ear for the melodies of the Metro as well. At the Opera stop named for the baroque lyric palace above, a plump jazz singer in a denim skirt and maroon sneakers croons “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” At Republique, a guerrilla band of Romanian gypsies hustles aboard with trumpets blaring “Besame Mucho” at point-blank range, one hand out for coins and one eye out for the police.

And when the motorman’s workday ends, sometimes he straps on a guitar himself at the Bastille station, with its staggering derelicts and regal Africans in turbans. Grandjean’s song “Thanks to the Musicians,” featured on a recent CD of 14 performers from the Metro, sounds like Maurice Chevalier meets Dixieland. It is an ode to a subterranean subculture:

*

“There will never be too much

never too much music

in the tunnels without end

of the Metropolitain.”

Unlike the singing motorman, most subway buskers in Paris do not work for the RATP, the city transit agency. Yet about 350 musicians wear badges issued by the RATP, which requires them to audition for authorization to make music underground. The badges represent a flourishing fusion of art, bureaucracy and immigrant cultures and have inspired similar efforts by the subways of London, Tokyo and Rotterdam.

Six years ago, the powers that be at the Paris subway came to the conclusion that musicians would always try to scratch out a living in the sprawling transit system, even if it was illegal. The RATP set out to simultaneously encourage and regulate performers, thereby ensuring a modicum of civic order and musical quality.

The program has helped Parisians to better appreciate a kind of buried treasure.

More than half the buskers are foreigners, mainly from Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. The artists on the CD, titled “Connections,” range from a dreadlocked Senegalese guitarist with flamenco influences to a Tuareg vocalist from the Sahara to six brothers whose subway performances of “rai,” a joyful musical style from Algeria, set off impromptu dance sessions in the tunnels. Together, they celebrate France’s multiethnic future, just as the Louvre Museum and the Eiffel Tower preserve the glories of the past.

“The first thing I tell people from cities who want to copy this is that you have to have the potential, the talent, the artists,” said Antoine Naso, the RATP’s in-house impresario. “Paris has a concentration, a mix of musicians from the entire world that come here. That’s our strength.”

Naso, a compactly built, 20-year employee of the Metro, has graying curly hair and the relaxed air of a man who likes his job. He balances an evident fondness for his musicians with a quiet determination to enforce the rules. Buskers are supposed to perform only in corridors and station lobbies, and not on platforms or in trains, where at close quarters they can create safety hazards and assault the eardrums.

The most frequent transgressors are the gypsy musicians from Eastern Europe who operate mafia-style, turning over their earnings to enforcers and avoiding contact with officialdom. They tend to play trumpet, violin and accordion, and not particularly well. If unauthorized performers get caught, they are fined $55.

“They are there as a form of business,” Naso said. “To make money fast. There is no artistic side. What we do is more artistic.”

Naso has begun to designate and spruce up performance areas in a few big stations. Overall, though, he lets buskers determine questions of turf among themselves, intervening only if there are disputes over prime spots.

Rules or no rules, Naso’s headquarters isn’t the usual dour outpost of French bureaucracy. The cramped, three-story storefront, located near Place de la Bastille, has a raffish charm. Film posters -- “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Moulin Rouge” -- share space with clippings about artists for whom the Paris subway was a stop on the way to fortune: Afro-British singer Khezia Jones; members of the French-born Gipsy Kings; and Laam, a French Tunisian, faux-blond street diva with a rags-to-riches story and a taste for wide-brimmed hats. Word has it that U.S. blues man Ben Harper also played in the Metro at some point, according to Naso.

Twice a year, musicians descend the circular stairway into Naso’s white-walled basement to audition before a panel of judges. On the first day of fall auditions this month, the judges were a documentary filmmaker and two employees of the transit agency’s business department. Naso chooses judges to blend artistic and layman’s perspectives: “They have to think with the mentality of a passenger. Is it good music? And is it music that it would be nice to hear in the Metro?”

Most applicants were veteran buskers renewing badges, which last a year and require a $17 processing fee. So the quality level was high and the mood good-natured. First came the six-man crew of Cenizas, or Ashes, one of the Latin American ensembles that fill the Montparnasse and Chatelet stations with the sounds of the Andes.

Rushing in late, flutist Noel Hernandez got laughs from the judges when he excused himself jovially: “Sorry, there were problems on Line 8. You know the RATP -- it just doesn’t work. The only ones who don’t go on strike are the musicians.”

The afternoon’s auditions featured a slightly corny but capable one-man band; a duo of slender, short-haired guitarists who served up mellow covers of the Sade hits “Smooth Operator” and “Diamond Life”; and a virtuoso of the banjo-like Russian balalaika.

“I play just in little stations, because the acoustics are better. And there are a lot of groups in the big stations,” said the balalaika player, Philippe Baudez, a lanky 55-year-old with a gray ponytail and melancholy eyes. “When the club where I’m playing is closed, I go to the Metro to pick up a little pocket money. I can make maybe 20 euros (about $23) in a few hours.”

The final audition was the most problematic for the judges. At first glance, Claudine Tauziede -- “MISS Tauziede; I prefer to be precise” -- had a certain “Gong Show” quality: a mop of gray hair, a thousand-yard stare behind thick glasses. She accompanied herself with a boombox blaring disco-techno chords; her dance steps were less than polished. She had been rejected at the last audition, apparently because she didn’t score well in the categories of “general presentation” and “vocal quality.”

But Naso treated her with gentle deference. And the lyrics roared out of her like a runaway express train. They were poetic, tormented riffs of her own composing. One song, titled “Apocalyptic Coca-Cola” had lines like this: “Who uncorked the bottle of Apocalyptic Coca-Cola?/It rained Coca-Cola for 40 days and 40 nights.” Another was a screed about Internet mania. For good measure, she finished with an Edith Piaf number about a motorcycle.

“I’ve got quite a bit of material, about 500 songs,” Tauziede told Naso. “I did some of my own arrangements. I auditioned in the spring” -- her tone turned accusing -- “but I never got a letter.”

“That’s correct. Unfortunately, you were not chosen,” he said. “Hopefully this time.”

“Yes, I always have a right to try again, don’t I?”

“Why do you want to play in the Metro?”

“To have more contact with the public. An artist wants as much contact with the public as possible,” she said with a kind of disheveled dignity. “I hope I get the letter this time. Where I live, sometimes people steal my mail.”

After she left, Naso looked reflective.

“The problem she’ll always have is that the judges aren’t sure how people will react to her,” he said. “But I have maybe one in a thousand performers like her. She’s very expressive. A very unique talent.”

Even for the talented, performing in the subway is not a cushy gig. Commuters charging through the turnstiles look like they are in no mood to give up a “Bonjour,” much less cash. Subways are gloomy by nature; the Paris Metro is no exception. Although it has an excellent grid with many stops and frequent trains, the cars tend to be aging and scarred. The seats are configured in claustrophobic clusters, forcing passengers so close together that they almost touch knees with the person facing them.

Parisians are grim and aloof commuters, according to Grandjean, the busker-motorman.

“People don’t talk much in the Paris subway,” he said. “They keep to themselves. You try to make conversation with someone, they look at you like: What does this guy want from me?”

Hardly anyone can make a living anymore just playing in the subway, buskers say. Instead, they see the Metro as a good place to practice in public. A showcase where you generate gigs by word of mouth, especially in ethnic communities. Most musicians keep fliers, business cards and CDs at the ready when they perform. Naso spends more and more time connecting artists with people who hire them as entertainment for parties, weddings and clubs.

When veteran buskers reminisce about their years underground, the Metro seems to swirl with echoes, legends and ghosts.

“I’ve seen impressive players,” said Miguel Llave, an Argentine immigrant. “I once saw a guitarist from Madagascar who played like George Benson. In ‘89, I met a classical guitarist at Saint-Michel -- the people really loved him. I’ve seen musicians of the level of the Moscow Philharmonic. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was this cellist who came to Paris who was so good. He didn’t speak any French, but I would just sit and listen to him play.”

Llave is a beefy 42-year-old with long, jet-black hair and the Argentine gift of gab. In the late 1980s he came here from the northern province of Jujuy, carrying his siku -- a traditional indigenous pan pipe -- and not much else.

“Where I’m from, Buenos Aires seems very far away,” he said one recent Friday night when he was serenading a rowdy parade of tourists, drunks, roughnecks and bohemian types at the Saint-Michel stop, near Notre Dame. “So for me, going to Paris was like going to the moon.”

Llave started out in the Metro with the typical Andean folk bands consisting of guitars, winds and percussion, teaming up with Bolivians, Peruvians and Colombians. There was -- and still is -- a big appetite in France for Latin music. Until the early 1990s, he said, the earnings were so good that he would turn down work in small clubs.

But times changed. The French economy tightened. Hungry immigrants with instruments flooded the subway system, a cacophony of buskers elbowing for position. Riders complained, and that’s when the police and the RATP cracked down.

Luckily, Llave had built a more solid life by then. He married a French woman and now has a 10-year-old son who plays guitar. Llave took courses at the Sorbonne and his style evolved; these days he dabbles in what he calls “ethno-jazz.” He displays mementos such as a photo with the actor Gerard Depardieu at a performance. Like many of the musicians on the “Connections” CD, Llave doesn’t rely on the Metro anymore.

“Because, I don’t care if you are Mozart or Piazzolla, you just aren’t going to make much down there,” he said.

One good subway line for buskers is the No. 8, where Grandjean drives trains: It snakes from middle-class southern Paris past centrally located stations where classical, jazz and folk artists entertain big, tourist-heavy crowds. Line 8 then slants into the grittier east side where African and Arab buskers do well.

Grandjean, a hearty 54-year-old, has been around long enough to recall the days when deadly high-voltage wires still ran right through the motorman’s booth. He describes a fellow driver with an unfortunate track record: Nine people tried to kill themselves by jumping in front of his train.

“Me, luckily, I have never had a suicide,” Grandjean says. “I like my work. There are colleagues who are depressed, almost suicidal. But I have my music. Music has allowed me to meet all kinds of interesting people, do all kinds of interesting things.”

A few hours later, Grandjean contentedly strums his guitar at the Bastille station alongside Guylaine Lugand, 27, who plays with him in a band called Public Service. In addition to being a roving supervisor for the RATP, Lugand is a conservatory-trained clarinetist and operetta singer with an angelic voice and face.

“She’s the star,” Grandjean declares. “She’s a serious musician.”

When their first notes echo off the dingy white tiles, the mood in the station changes. Some commuters slow down, glancing almost furtively. Others stop in their tracks to listen.

Between songs, an unshaven young man with a wool hat jammed down above agitated eyes materializes right in front of Grandjean.

“Were you playing music?” the youth asks eagerly, reaching into his pocket. “Here. Play something for me, please.”

Unruffled, Grandjean accepts the coins -- “for good luck.” Standing toe-to-toe with his listener, the motorman sings:

*

“The sound of the tires

the doors sliding shut

the train bell and the Bach suites

It’s a daily dance in the belly of Paris.”

*