Street performing, or “busking,” is one of the oldest and purest forms of public entertainment alive today. It’s a human tradition that transcends time and culture, and it’s an art that’s found a special home in Boulder, thriving on the Pearl Street Mall.
For most of the year, that popular strip of Boulder teems with musicians, contortionists, jugglers and other various artists — magicians, street poets, teens banging away at Zimbabwean mriba’s. Each performer shares their act for whatever families, couples or individuals might be curious enough to stop and watch. For many of these artists, this is not only their passion, but their full-time profession.
There aren’t a lot of places like Pearl Street in the U.S., according to many of these buskers. That’s why so many street performers, many of whom travel the nation (and even the world at large), spend so much time on the cobbled corners of the Mall.
Peter Irish, MasterBlaster G and Ibashi-I are just three in the medley of talented performers. Next time you pass any of them by, give ‘em a big applause (and maybe a tip). They work hard and love the attention.
Peter Irish
It isn’t every day you get to watch children throw knives at a man, 10 feet above the ground on a plank balanced on a rolling tube. Nor is it a very common sight to see someone doing yoga while balancing a burning chair on their face. But, these scenes aren’t unheard of on Pearl Street — at least, not when Peter Irish is performing.
Irish is a busker from Virginia who started performing in San Francisco before eventually finding his way to Colorado. He now lives and performs in Boulder — juggling fire, sharp objects and balls in a fantastic display of coordination and bravery. Irish is also a renowned and world-record-holding foot juggler, and he performs all over North America.
“I work festivals and fairs all over the place, but Pearl Street is my main spot. It’s home,” Irish says. “There’s really not that many places in the country where you can do this anymore and Boulder is one of the friendliest.”
Irish has worked the streets of New York City, Key West, Clear Water Beach, Baltimore, Boston and Bentonville, Canada. But, he says, the Pearl Street Mall is just too special to leave.
“You can go other places, but other places are more competitive.” Irish says. “The cool thing about Boulder, is we all know each other, we’re all friends, we work cooperatively.”
This creates a special kind of community among the street performers here, Irish says. They take turns working “the spot” — the intersection of Pearl Street and 13th Street — rotating shows and hanging out in between them.
The feats that Irish performs are nothing short of spectacular; the show is gripping from start to finish. Will the flaming chair stay balanced on his face as he descends into the lotus pose? Will today’s volunteer-child-knife thrower miss the mark and impale him? Can he actually juggle three balls with his feet and three with his hands all at the same time?
For Irish, it’s all just another day on the job, another chance to perform his art and impress his crowd.
MasterBlaster G
Do you hear some jazzy trumpet music echoing up the street? Is it bright? Bouncy? Vibrant? Are there tap shoes involved?
It’s probably MasterBlaster G doing his thing.
“I’ve been playing the trumpet for 13 years now,” says Gabriel Angelo (aka, MasterBlaster G), and he’s been tap dancing for eight years on top of that. “At this point in time, this is my career.”
MasterBlaster G is on the Mall week days and almost every weekend, tapping his heart out and blasting his trumpet… masterfully. Between his skill with the brass instrument, and his talent with the taps, MasterBlaster G is a sensational one-man band — a performer who’s hard to ignore and even harder not to smile at. His music is infectious.
“I do what I do to show people to love and live,” MasterBlaster G says. “It’s all about love and life.”
MasterBlaster G started busking at 10 years old in San Francisco where people knew him as the “San Francisco Trumpet Kid.” Since then, he’s played over 550 professional events and has been on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. He moved to Boulder with his wife, and now he’s a regular on the Pearl Street Mall, blasting his roughed-up trumpet and ratatatapping along with his custom-welded steel street-tapping shoes.
It’s a classy act. And one that is a welcome element of the Pearl Street atmosphere.
Ibashi-I
Born almost 3,000 miles away, on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, Ibashi-I has come a long way to perform his act in Boulder. Known around town as, “the Pearl Street Contortionist,” he is one of the most recognizable, and attention-grabbing, regulars on the Mall.
“Everybody look at me!” Ibashi-I calls to passersby as he stretches in preparation for his performance. “I need attention.”
Once he’s satisfied with the size of his crowd, Ibashi-I will bend over backwards for their applause. Literally. He shimmies and folds himself in half to fit inside of a 14” tube and even twists himself, impossibly it seems,
into a 20-inch-by-20-inch plastic box. “It’s not easy, making a living out of a box,” he jokes, kinking his body at strange and unnatural looking angles to fit into the cube.
“I’ve been here now for 30 years,” Ibashi-I says. He moved to Boulder because it was a good place for street performers like him and because it was so beautiful — now, it’s home. But, in the wintertime, this island native migrates to follow the warmth.
“I leave and come back,” he says. “I usually go to Key West, New Orleans, places like that in the winter time … I got to stay with the warm weather.”
When it’s warm in Boulder, though, Ibashi-I can be found on the Mall every weekend performing his fantastic feats of flexibility, drawing oohs, ahhs and laughter from the captivated crowd he always seems to attract.
