Horn players blew sweet sounds as they rode in the vintage subway cars.
BY TEQUILA MINSKY | The subway train’s location and departure were very hush-hush. It was a nostalgia train painted a flat green with wicker seats, ceiling fans and 1930s-era ads in the vintage cars from the New York Transit Museum’s antique fleet. The train was brought out to celebrate the centennial of the birth of Billy Strayhorn, the composer of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and to kick off the holiday season.
Seven years after the opening of the A subway line, Duke Ellington gave jazz composer and musician Strayhorn directions on how to get to a new job in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. This was the inspiration for Strayhorn’s famous standard, which became the Ellington band’s signature tune and a soundtrack of sorts for millions of straphangers.
By late Sunday afternoon, the waiting train on the D train track at the W. 145th St. and Amsterdam Ave. station delighted those who found their way there.
Meanwhile, Strayhorn family members, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and her husband, Cal Snyder, and dozens of straphangers circled the bevy of jazz musicians performing on the station’s lower platform.
The day’s jazz artists, the Donald Malloy Quartet and the Evan Sherman Entourage, are part of the M.T.A.’s Music Under New York program.
When the train took off around 5 p.m. the musicians joined the crowded train, playing in two cars, sometimes serenading select riders during the entire A train express ride with stops from W. 145th St. to Columbus Circle.
The bands continued to play while riding up the escalator, then switched to New Orleans style while marching along Broadway to Jazz at Lincoln Center. The nostalgia train rode on along the A train route.
The A train went into service in 1932. It’s the world’s longest subway route at more than 32 miles. Three hundred cars were originally ordered under contract R-1. As the IND expanded through the ’30s, orders were placed under contracts R-4, R-6, R-7 and R-9, adding 1,703 new cars to the IND system. The nostalgia train included a selection of the vintage subway cars.
More than 350 musicians currently are in the M.T.A.’s music program, playing blues, classical folk, jazz, Latin, reggae and rock, performing on fiddles, guitars, harps, horns, koras, saws, and steel drums, at 31 sites throughout the subway system. The program began in 1985.
M.T.A. Arts & Design produced the celebratory day of travel, jazz and history, with collaborators Jazz at Lincoln Center, NYC Transit, the Transit Museum and the Music Under NY team.
In June 2016, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will wrap up the season by celebrating Billy Strayhorn with Wynton Marsalis. Strayhorn died in 1967.
