Entertainment

If You Can Make It There: Acts Try Out for NY Subway Spots

Published

11 years ago

May 20, 2015

Seth Myers of Receta Secreta, carries his bass away from the stage after auditioning for judges in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall in New York, Tuesday, May 19, 2015. About 70 musicians and others showed up Tuesday at the station to vie for official permission to set up their acts on an underground platform or walkway. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — It’s a rite of spring: performers auditioning for the privilege of doing their thing in grubby, noisy subway stations.

Seventy showed up Tuesday at Grand Central Terminal, vying for permission to set up their underground acts for tips. They appeared before a jury of musicians and transit employees in the elegant Vanderbilt Hall above the train tracks.

This year’s motley musical crew, from countries around the world, will soon find out who won the right to be part of the Music Under New York program run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the nation’s biggest mass transit system.

“I always dreamed of arriving in New York City,” said Oliver Dagum, a Philippine-born U.S. Air Force sergeant stationed in New Jersey who left the military last week. “I always believed that there’s something between me and the city. It’s amazing. It’s grandiose. I feel uplifted.”

He said playing in the subway system is a gauge of how good he is.

“If you’re able to convince one or two rushing people to take the time to listen to you, that’s the biggest acknowledgment,” he said.

Dagum switched his military uniform for a woolen cap and guitar at Grand Central, a long way from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan where he once served. He sang a mellow “Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5.

Drummer Louis Conselatore, an Ivy League law school graduate who worked as an ordained Unitarian minister, played his five-minute stint with two other musicians who call themselves the Viva Vallenato Badass Accordion Band.

“Two of us are Italians, one of us is Puerto Rican, and we’re all from New Jersey and we fell in love with Colombian music,” said Phil “Felipe” Passantino, the accordionist. “It has a rhythm that’s very infectious and makes people dance and laugh. It’s a peasant’s music, poor people’s music that springs from the soul.”

Three hundred performers entered the Music Under New York contest months ago to even be selected for Tuesday’s live, six-hour contest. The jury picks about two dozen winners, who’ll rake in up to hundreds of dollars a day when they’re dispersed at subway spots around the city. It’s illegal for unapproved artists to perform in the subway system.

Jacinta Clusellas, a Brooklyn resident from Buenos Aires with a guitar, wore giant blue wings on Tuesday to reflect a short story by the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario.

“It’s about a man with a brilliant mind who had a hard time expressing himself, and he said, ‘I have a bluebird trapped inside my head,'” she explained.

The man kills himself, she said, leaving a note that reads, “I leave the door open to let my bluebird fly away.”

Clusellas attended Boston’s elite Berklee College of Music.

After all, some of New York’s finest musicians don’t appear at Carnegie Hall. They also practice and practice to get to a subway station.

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Oakland Post: Week of September 2 – 8, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of September 2 – 8, 2026

Published

5 days ago

September 7, 2026

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Black History

Jackie Wright Champions Bay Area Stories, Filmmakers and Cultural Institutions

As an award-winning communications professional, Wright has worked with corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, educational institutions, artists, and community organizations. In 2026, she expanded that work by launching an introductory public relations class for small businesses and nonprofits, offering practical tools for gaining visibility, shaping messages and building productive relationships with the media.

Published

2 weeks ago

August 30, 2026

Post News Group

Jackie Wright of Wright Enterprises. Photo courtesy of Wright Enterprises.

By Carla Thomas

Jackie Wright has spent more than two decades helping people, organizations and communities understand the power of a well-told story.

As founder and president of Wright Enterprises, a San Francisco-based strategic communications and public affairs firm, Wright has built a career spanning journalism, public relations, media relations, crisis communications, community engagement and multimedia storytelling.

Wright’s commitment to storytelling is also deeply personal. She wrote and co-directed the 15-minute documentary, “Love Separated in Life…Love Reunited in Honor,” which chronicles the story of her parents, Specialist Five (S5 Wyley Wright Jr. and Ouida Fay McClendon Wright. Her father, a U.S. Army helicopter crew chief, died in Vietnam in 1964 while serving as an honor guard during a visit by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Decades later, Wright and her siblings had their father exhumed from a segregated cemetery in Jacksonville, Florida, and their mother moved from her burial place in Georgia so the couple could be reunited at Arlington National Cemetery in 2014.

The family journey later took Wright and her sister to Vietnam, where they discovered the former military compound that had been named in honor of their father and another fallen soldier. The documentary, centered on love, war, family, racial understanding, and remembrance, earned festival recognition at screenings.

“It was quite an honor to learn about my family’s history and share it on film,” said Wright.

That filmmaking experience complements Wright’s longstanding advocacy for independent cinema. She has served as a media partner and brand ambassador for Bay Area film festivals, including the San Francisco Black Film Festival, Oakland International Film Festival, and the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa.

“It’s important to help filmmakers and underrepresented stories reach broader audiences,” said Wright.

Whether promoting a neighborhood organization, championing an independent filmmaker or preserving her own family history, Wright has remained consistent. Through Wright Enterprises, she has turned communications into both a profession and a form of community service, telling stories that might otherwise go unheard.

“Our stories are an integral part of our history, and our history is not only American history, but worldwide,” she said.