It was about 7:50 pm. The streets were empty. And the unlikeliest sound was wafting onto Sachem Street: a tenor saxophone playing pop.
The sound came from the space between the castle-like building at the corner of Sachem and Prospect, Osborn Memorial Laboratories, and the hill below Kline Biology Tower that is now cordoned off and covered with mounds of dirt and construction materials.
You might have closed your eyes and thought you were a street away from a crowded boardwalk on the beach where a crowd of loose-legged tourists were lounging after an evening martini. Then you would open them and see that you were still in an empty city where a pandemic had ground a massive construction project to a halt, and that the buildings definitely were not dancing to Rihanna.
From Prospect Street, one could just make out the silhouette of a saxophone player against the beige steps at the far end of the courtyard just below Kroon Hall.
Lucas Sanor was standing at the end of the walkway that frames the building’s base, an amp next to him blasting the background track. A vast, empty rectangular green expanse lay before him.
The sound reverberated around the courtyard, from the smooth beige stone of Kroon’s southern wall onto the rough brown of Osborn’s ramparts.
Sanor said he showed up at around 6:30 on this Saturday evening.
“I needed to practice and I just needed to go outside. It was so beautiful,” he said. He recently bought an amp, and he wanted to practice with it. “I was just practicing and you guys showed up. I didn’t think it was going to turn into a show!”
But it did, if an audience of five (including this reporter), all spaced out by about 50 feet around the perimeter of the courtyard, makes it a show.
Six if you count the backhoe that sat unmoving behind him, its massive iron claw resting on the dirt.
“I was just out for a walk and I heard it,” said Nivanthika Wimalasena (pictured above), a PhD student in neuroscience at Yale. She sat on a wooden bench at the farthest end of the courtyard and listened.
Ally Hammer, a Yale senior, said she also happened upon the music and stopped to watch. At one point, she stood up on her bench and danced.
Sarah and Annette, both business students at Yale (who declined to give their last names), sat together on another bench. They came to the courtyard as Sanor was setting up, and they stayed for the show.
Sanor played mostly covers of pop songs: Rihanna, Calvin Harris, Paramore. At one point, he left the amp silent, and played a lilting rendition of “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid without accompaniment.
When he plays for college students, the Disney songs tend to go over best, he said. But most of the time, it’s the pop songs that really get people up dancing.
He took his rehearsal in the pop direction next, with “Lean On,” by Major Lazer & DJ Snake.
A man in a bulky blue coat clutching a Dunkin Donuts cup walked down the stairs behind him, then ducked into the arches at the base of the wall of Kroon to keep his distance from Sanor. He continued under the arches until the end of the courtyard, where he crossed the stone path toward Osborn Labs.
Sam Gurwitt Photos
Sanor said he started playing pop in the backup band of the show choir at his Illinois high school. Before that, there was only concert band and jazz band. Then he played Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You Been Gone” with the show choir. It was the first of what would be many pop covers to come.
In college, he joined another show choir backup band. Then, near the end of college, he and a few friends started a five-piece band that did all covers of breakup songs. They called themselves “Singles Therapy.”
When he got to Yale to start his PhD in molecular biology, he thought, “Oh man, how fun would it be to just play Christmas music for people walking downtown!”
In 2017, he finally started. He got permission from the city and Yale, and has set up on Chapel Street outside of the Yale Art Gallery for the month leading up to Christmas ever since.
Now he’s just finished up his PhD, and he’s getting his musical chops back in shape. He said he wants to learn a set of 50 songs that he can play at weddings, other events, and on the street. He’s looking for more house music songs to cover; they sound good on saxophone, he said. He and his roommate have also “unofficially officially” started a pop band with his roommate’s cousin.
Soon he’ll go work on his sister’s farm for a few months. Then he might move to Chicago, where he could street perform. Until then, he has the stone walls and unmoving backhoes of New Haven in lockdown to play for. And perhaps a handful of passersby, as long as they sit 50 feet apart on benches.