Editor's Note: Adam is Australian. We have no idea what he is talking about either.
There are two cultural mainstays of the Brisbane busking scene: there's "the Jamaican guy" - who is in fact named Desmond, and is rather from Trinidad and Tobago - and then there's "that blind saxophone guy". I know this because I have seen these two musicians play on the Queen Street Mall since my early teens, perhaps even before, right through to the present.
An honest-to-God picture of Desmond!
Desmond, the Jamaican-who's-not-a-Jamaican, is quite good at what he does. I am convinced that he can play any popular song on the steel drums. I just wish that he wouldn't play "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" so damn often. He must have found the cover songs to be more profitable, too, as his original material has diminished in frequency over the years. It's a pity, as this was the music that had me imagining crystal waters and white sand beaches with coconut palms and pina coladas, which always brought a smile to my face.
Dezzy, in his natural habitat (outside Treasury Casino, not Trinidad/Tobago).
"That blind saxophone guy", on the other hand, does not. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not sight-ist or anything - in fact, I love blind people; blind musicians especially. Take Ray Charles, Joseph Haydn and Stevie Wonder, for example - all blind and all brilliant musicians. But not this guy. As George Clooney once explained in O Brother, Where Art Thou?:
"...The blind are reputed to possess sensitivities compensatin' for their lack of sight, even to the point of developing para-normal psychic powers."
After at least a decade of blindness, the Blind Saxophonist has failed to develop his dexterity and listening skills beyond what I consider to be a fourth grade level. His melodies are cringeworthy, akin to scribbling on the open air, and his rhythms are nearly non-existent, by which I mean it's locked into the same pattern day-in, day-out. Without fail, his melodic scribble employs the following rhythm: dotted crotchet, quaver, dotted crotchet, quaver, and so on, like an infernal peg-leg march. Like the spider crawling up and falling down the water spout again and again, his music goes absolutely nowhere, direction-less.
Having endured over eleven years of this man's infernal tootling, I can only conclude that the Labrador and sunglasses are the sole gimmicks behind his sustainability as a street performer. Fact is, if he wasn't blind, he wouldn't get a look in. Â
BLIND GUY'S SCORE:
1/2 out of 5 Red Tri-planes
DEZZY'S SCORE:
Â
3.5 out of 5 Red Tri-planes
[Stop playing Evita and I'll give you an extra half.]
