He finds a common idiom between jazz music and Calcutta's sidewalk vendors and wants to take the chord connect to the world. 'Improvisation is working constructively with disorder, and that's what the unorganised retailers on the streets are doing all the time,' feels India-born German jazz vibraphone artiste Christopher Dell, who was in town for a music residency project by Max Mueller Bhavan (MMB). telegraph Christopher Dell photo © Bishwarup Dutta The Berkeley School of Music major from Berlin has done a series of 'musical-intervention' performances at 10 different street locations among hawkers and pedestrians to highlight how they make the city's public spaces 'come alive'. 'The West usually talks of India's IT prowess, business and globalisation, but rarely about the everyday public-space life in cities like Calcutta. The hawkers perform a critical cultural role even as they eke out a living,' observes Dell. Through his vibraphone solos in BBD Bag, Shyambazar, Gariahat and also City Centre, the 42-year-old musician, who also teaches architecture theory, underlines the 'tacit urbanism' of the hawkers, their innovative use and alternative interpretation of public space. 'An exercise like this can point out possibilities of recovering public spaces that are otherwise not so inspiring. For instance, the space in front of a subway can have someone playing the drums instead of the ubiquitous cigarette kiosk,' says city-based restoration architect and urban planner Manish Chakrabarti, who has helped Dell in his research and shared the stage with him in an interactive session. 'The music on the streets helped highlight the cultural aspect of our social interaction with the customers,' says Sudipta Moitra of the Hawker Sangram Committee, which is collaborating with the MMB for the project. Dell's sidewalk shows were canned by local documentary film-maker Ranu Ghosh. The film, Kolkata Monodosis - Musical Interventions in Temporary Public Spaces, documents his live, solo and impromptu performances on the streets of Calcutta. A web page is being done with clips of the film. 'Besides, I'm in talks with NGOs and the traffic police, and will put together fruits of all the research in a downloadable format. It's an invite to the world to discover an unheralded yet integral side of Calcutta,' the jazz artiste declares.