Fiddler on the Hoof	by George Sax

Meet busker David Adamczyk

The middle-aged man slowly riding his bike along the sidewalk on Elmwood Avenue tells the slim youth playing the violin, “You’re doing some fine work there, young man.” The musician, David Adamczyk, is sitting on a low retaining wall in front of an upscale delicatessen. The bicyclist continues on his way without pausing or leaving any money in the empty glass jar in front of Adamczyk. It doesn’t stay empty for long. Within several minutes, pedestrians have begun dropping coins and bills in the jar, though none of them speak to the performer.

This silence may be out of respect for the music, an unlikely sidewalk performance of klezmer. For the better part of a half-hour, Adamczyk fills the warm, early-evening air with the long, sinuous, sometimes syncopated lines of this old, Eastern European Jewish dance music.

It’s not just the streetside klezmer set that’s unusual. Adamczyk’s outdoor performances are a distinct oddity in Buffalo. He’s been playing on the streets as part of a detour from formal composition studies after two years at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City.

“I wanted to live in the real world after so much time in school,” he says. Before college, he spent years working on his art at the Park School in Amherst, and in private instruction with Suzuki teacher Mary Kay Neal, and noted local violinist Thomas Halpin. He was concertmaster in the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra.

He’s been playing the violin for 16 years, since he was four and his parents noticed his precocious aptitude, which didn’t encompass the keyboard. “I could never really get the piano down,” he says.

The street-musician career move was the idea of a friend who suggested he get a busking license last year. It’s been a different kind of learning experience since then.

“I tried improvising at first,” he says, “but I didn’t think I could sustain it.” He began to systematically assemble a street repertoire, which now ranges from what he calls “fiddle music,” with a bluegrass flavor, on to the classical compositions of 20th-century violinist Fritz Kreisler. In between, there’s Spanish, gypsy, and European folk melodies. The klezmer is partly a matter of heritage (his mother is Jewish) and partly because it seems to him to be some kind of musical link between the Eastern music he likes—particularly Indian—and the West.

Adamczyk plays his own outdoor circuit, which runs from Elmwood down to Allen Street in the evening, and on to downtown at lunch hours during the week. He’s played the Allentown Art Festival and the Taste of Buffalo. (“People kept asking for ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia.’”)

He’s also been playing for a couple of months with a four-man group called Casperous Vine, led by guitarist Paul Kozlowski. (They’ll be playing at the grand opening of Chow Chocolate on Main Street next Friday, July 25, and at the New Phoenix Theatre on Johnson Park the weekend of August 14-16.)

“I’m still learning music all the time, and it’s freer now because I have more control over it,” Adamczyk observes. But he’s also learned one or two surprising things about his new outdoor venues. He has occasionally played Jewish cantorial music, serious liturgical work, but he has found “it makes a lot of people sad. So I’ve learned not to play it during happy hour.”

—george sax