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The underground life of Astoria’s Saw Lady: Natalia Paruz
ne day she was playing on break in the parking lot of the Broadway theater where she sold souvenirs, when a man walking by stopped and gave her five dollars. At that moment she had her first inkling. And when, at her coworkers’ insistence, she played out front during a play intermission some time later and made more than her shift pay, she knew: she was a busker. Busking is the ancient act of performing in public for tips, and the city is ambivalent about it. While busking is generally tolerated, it is forbidden on trains, and police sometimes push back if they feel like it. (A $150 ticket for weapon carrying prompted Paruz to take the teeth off of her busking saws). On the other hand, there’s the Music Under New York program, which is something of a holy grail for buskers. Paruz, a member since the mid-‘90s, is one of just over 100 musicians permitted to play three-hour sets a few times a week at designated performance spots throughout the subway system. To earn that privilege she quit her job and struck out for the sidewalks of Times Square. Winter drove her into the subway. To her surprise, the subteranean open space was perfectly-suited for saw playing. “I was totally hooked on the phenomenal acoustics in the subway,” Paruz said. “I never wanted to go back to playing above ground.”
Another thing she realized after a few years in the subway: so much happens in a day of busking, you’re liable to forget most of it. So she started jotting notes between songs, using her saw blade for a desk, and in the late ‘90s she started the blog, “Subway Music.” Unable to find software for it, she wrote the HTML herself. It began as a personal journal. “But then people started commenting and I realized that it’s another platform to bring people together,” she wrote in an email. Her blog posts read more like ledger entries than short stories now, in part because of the sheer quantity of people she sees in a day. Over the course of a three-hour show, she might interact with drunks and businessmen, Japanese tourists and orchestra conductor friends. Below-ground, she writes, “the level of humanity among these people is beautifully high.” Even the scariest and most frustrating people, she concludes again and again, harbor “hearts of gold.” Her experience seems to bear this out. There was the girl who stole from her bucket, and came back months later with a box of cookies as an offering. Then again there was also the scarier thief who never came back. “But that’s New York,” Moses Josiah said, recalling his own tip-theft experience between songs at the Times Square shuttle station. Josiah, 82, is the city’s other saw-playing subway veteran. Like Paruz, the vertan busker
has a rosy outlook. “The people of New York, most of them are givers,” he added. “They give so, so much.” Paruz remembers the blind man years ago, swaying as he listened to her play. A stranger bought a cassette tape from her and stuck it his hands, then disappeared into the crowd. And the silent man, who was deaf but could hear the frequencies of her saw. There have been millions more. “They say if you stand in one place in New York long enough, eventually you’ll see everyone who lives here,” Paruz said. And why not? Magical thinking has brought her this far.
Saw Shopping for Dummies
and Westphal company has been a prominent saw-maker since the 1920s, when saws provided novelty backing for many vaudeville acts. Like the best buskers and vaudevillians - and saw-makers for that matter - Mussehl and Westphal claims an unmatched technique and superior product. You can order one of their English steel tenor saw sets from www.musicalsaws.com. Across the pond, Swedish precision toolmaker Bahco puts out a musical saw they call “Stradivarius” after the legendary Italian violinmaker Antonio Stradivari. Each saw is tested by a professional violinist, and only 500 are made per year, so good luck finding one.
Or, for what Paruz describes as a “mellower” sound, you could try the C. Blacklock Special. Named after its inventor, late American OldTime Country Music Hall of Fame inductee Charlie Blacklock, the saw is available in all sizes at www. blacklocksaws.com. Saws, like other instruments, require their share of accessories, from cases to rosin to bowstrings. To avoid crimping your hand on the blade’s end, Paruz recommends a clamp-on tip handle. Paruz’s reward for wrestling her own beefy, 36-inch busking saw is a three octaves range. But it comes with a sore arm. “After all,” she said, “you’re bending steel.”
People interested in a starter saw need not settle for lumberjack hardware.
According to Paruz’s research, saw playing goes back as far as 300 years ago, and the making of musical saws has been fine-tuned plenty since then. Most musical saws now boast a range of at least two octaves, and many are classified in a way that should be familiar to former high school band members: tenor, bass and baritone. The Wisconsin-based Mussehl
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