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The Pied Piper of Brooklyn Plays Sax


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That Healing Jazz Thing on a Porch in Brooklyn

“He was our heard-out-the-window Pied Piper, this saxophonist who signaled the arrival of evening by playing that haunting hymn “Amazing Grace.”

He began playing in the depths of plague and loss in Brooklyn, those early April days when the wail of ambulance sirens was our city’s night song. It took several days of listening out our window in Flatbush for my wife, Evelyn, and me to slip on our masks and wander around the corner to Marlborough Road.

Mr. Nathanson’s band grew by the day. Albert Marquès, a Barcelona-born Latin jazz musician and public-school teacher, began piping away on his melodica as his children, ages 3 and 6, danced and twirled on the sidewalk. The Haitian jazz guitarist Eddy Bourjolly came in from Canarsie, while Eric Alabaster, a retired teacher and drummer, and Mo Saleem, a Pakistani musician marooned by the virus, kept rhythm on drums and the dholak, a two-headed hand drum.”

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