what's in the NYC air?
besides pollution of course
Have you ever heard music so good that you start laughing?
Last Friday evening, I was relaxing after coming home from the gym, looking for a YouTube video to watch while I ate mango ice cream.
My algorithm soup surfaced ARIatHOME who was livestreaming. I’d seen a couple of his short videos over the week and so I clicked on. Ari is a musician, who walks around NYC with a piano and mixing equipment strapped to him, making songs with strangers he meets along the way.
It was the evening for me, in New York it was a bright afternoon. Ari is walking around the city, his friend recording him as he layers drums, chords and bass. When I started watching the livestream, he had already been making music for some time, and he would continue for another two hours before I went to bed.
At the 52 minute mark, the first stranger approached, strolling casually down the street. He looked like a New York Cowboy, wearing dungarees over a grey sweater, a feathered hat, and red-framed sunglasses. Ari offered the mic to him, and he says he can’t rap but he can sing, accompanying the dance track Ari had spent 15 minutes creating perched in front of a building. From the first note, his voice was sure. It was warm and bright, textured with a slight rasp. He passed his phone to a stranger to hold, who then handed it back to him as they began walking away. He followed Ari, tethered to him by the microphone, and then finally the pair introduced themselves to each other. As the song continued his confidence grew, and he sang with a bounce in his step as they walked through rails of clothes and onlookers.
They agreed to make another song together, which took slightly longer as Ari had to make it from scratch. Despite the awkwardness of waiting for the track to be built up, the stranger, Chaz (@langleyseye), engaged the gathering crowd, informing their newfound audience of Ari’s skill and encouraging him. This second track was a mix of one of Chaz’s songs, titled ‘Wonderful Day’, with a fun chromatic hook. Ari rapped over the track as Chaz adlibs with smooth vocal runs. The song matched the weather.
When they finish, one of their audience members asks if he can hop onto the next track. He wore a dark green jacket and a mustard yellow bucket hat. He started rapping before Ari finished laying down the beat. He started by complimenting an onlooker, a slow warm up, before he began a more complex flow. Out of all the artists, he relied on repetition the most to find his way out of a groove, or would bounce off of the environment around him. He shouted out his grandmother and twin brother, and even proposed to a woman in the audience via freestyle. When Ari took over for a verse, this stranger had been rapping for six minutes straight with no signs of stopping. He continued for another three minutes, still holding his own with three-syllable rhymes on the fly (mountain man/hooligan). Then the stranger (@thah00ligan), who is also a breakdancer, handed Ari the mic, and back-flipped off of a wall. He danced along to Ari’s freestyle, just as improvised as his words. Luckily no children caught a stray leg in the process.
The next man to approach Ari runs a graffiti hat stand next to where he was just performing. This man (@nexushops) rapped with an understated calmness, all steady and sure.. His performance was more static than the previous two, but with no less impact. When he stopped, Ari asked him to continue, and he did with lines like “People coming across the border for a better drink of water / My people made this land change through the pain and the torture.” For those of you keeping score, the first line has two internal rhymes (border/water), whereas the second line has three (made/change/pain) while also rhyming with the previous line (water/torture). That’s before you even consider the emotional weight of the words. All improvised.
I witnessed a couple more of these musical strangers before I clicked off, but I’ll leave my description of the livestream here.
What Ari achieves is nothing short of incredible, navigating busy New York streets with a rig strapped to him that’s more jetpack than mixing studio. Music springs from him, radiating out into the city. He welcomes strangers into his space, gives them a way to spotlight their creativity. Some of them are musicians by trade, for others music is a hobby or side project. All of them get to share in the art.