(114) "Are you musicians?", asks the black man when I am with an American

On the afternoon of September 14th 1995 into my mind came the memory of an incident from one evening in March 1979 in New York.
I had gone to a bar with three or four other chess players. For some reason the barman, a black man, had asked us, "Are you guys musicians?"

That evening I got into a mini-cab in Camden, North London with American, John Bazigos.
The driver was a black man and, although as in the New York bar the conversation did not in any way touch upon music, he too asked us if we were musicians. 
Those were the only two occasions that, either by myself or in the company of others, I was ever asked if I was a musician. 
(Although, to be fair, I had once been singing out loud for a while whilst playing a friendly chess game and a spectator (a Scandinavian I seem to recall) stunned me by saying I had to be a professional singer. I think that had happened in the 1980s.)

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