Some pret­ty famous faces ride the New York City sub­way. Was David Bowie’s ever among them?

If so, he suc­ceed­ed in dodg­ing the cam­eras of the curi­ous.

His home stop would have been SoHo’s Broadway/Lafayette—close to the Ange­li­ka Film Cen­ter, Hous­ing Works Book­store Cafe, and an upscale men’s cloth­ing store that opened on the sacred ground of CBGB, where Bowie and Bian­ca Jag­ger once arrived by lim­ou­sine to see Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

From there, it’s not exact­ly a straight shot to the David Bowie Is exhib­it at the Brook­lyn Muse­um, but the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Tran­sit Author­i­ty will get you there for the price of a sin­gle $2.75 sub­way fare.

Giv­en that the MTA stopped accept­ing tokens 15 years ago, you’ll also need to cough up $1 for a Metro­Card. You may want to even if you already own one.

In cel­e­bra­tion of all things Bowie, the MTA has teamed with Spo­ti­fy to cre­ate 5 lim­it­ed edi­tion Metro­Cards, avail­able in vend­ing machines through­out the sta­tion for a New York minute—about as long as it takes Bowie fans to descend en masse to snag the instant col­lectibles of their hero in some of his many guis­es:

Zig­gy Star­dust

Aladdin Sane

The Thin White Duke

Scary Mon­sters’ Pier­rot

and, most touch­ing­ly, the teenage David Jones, aka Bowie, sax­o­phon­ist for the Kon-Rads.

Under­ground Bowie mania extends way beyond Metro­Cards. Until Mother’s Day, the unusu­al­ly lofty sta­tion is fes­tooned with Bowie—everything from fan art to giant repro­duc­tions of pho­tos from the cur­rent exhi­bi­tion.

Many of the images are accom­pa­nied by a scannable Spo­ti­fy code to trans­port rid­ers to a rel­e­vant sound file, a nifty echo of the pro­gres­sive audio muse­um-goers expe­ri­ence through their head­phones.

The glob­al exhib­it has Lon­don roots, but the MTA is focused on Bowie’s ties to New York with pho­tos and video stills from such loca­tions as Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Madi­son Square Gar­den, and the late, lament­ed Mag­ic Shop stu­dio.

Civic pride is also on dis­play in the form of city-spe­cif­ic Bowie quotes post­ed through­out the sta­tion:

I have a great time here: we can go where we want, eat where we want, walk out with our child, go to the park, ride the sub­way, do the things that any fam­i­ly does.

Ah ha! So he did ride the sub­way here, as well as in Japan (below).

Accord­ing to a fan on Bow­ery Boo­gie, he also popped up at the New York Pub­lic Library’s Mul­ber­ry Street branch, just around the cor­ner from the subway’s entrance. To find your way there, con­sult the bright orange “Bowie’s Neigh­bor­hood Map” before leav­ing the sta­tion, where your loca­tion is denot­ed with a light­ning bolt.

See rid­ers’ pho­tos of the sub­way takeover here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

The Peri­od­ic Table of David Bowie: A Visu­al­iza­tion of the Sem­i­nal Artist’s Influ­ence and Influ­ences

Stream David Bowie’s Com­plete Discog­ra­phy in a 19-Hour Playlist: From His Very First Record­ings to His Last

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, April 23 for the third install­ment of her lit­er­ary-themed vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Why is it, as Bri­an Gilmore writes at Jaz­zTimes, that “even peo­ple who hard­ly lis­ten to jazz adore this album”? Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue hard­ly needs an intro­duc­tion. Many thou­sands of words have been writ­ten about its leg­endary com­po­si­tion and record­ing, about the extra­or­di­nary ensem­ble respon­si­ble for its existence—Davis, John Coltrane, “Can­non­ball” Adder­ley, Paul Cham­bers, Jim­my Cobb, and a young Bill Evans—and about the year of its release, 1959, a water­shed moment in the his­to­ry of jazz, and of near­ly all mod­ern music.

“It’s no longer nec­es­sary to remind music lovers that Kind of Blue is essen­tial lis­ten­ing,” argues The Guardian’s John Ford­ham, “and that every­body who wants to make sense of the music of our time ought to have at least some idea of what’s good about it.” Should your edu­ca­tion in Kind of Blue be lack­ing, you can get caught up on the basics in the Poly­phon­ic video just above, which quick­ly gets to the heart of Davis’ musi­cal inno­va­tion: mak­ing the defin­i­tive break with bebop and set­ting the stan­dard for modal jazz, and thus the explo­sion of free jazz inno­va­tions to come.

Where most forms of jazz had built increas­ing­ly com­plex chord changes over which soloists impro­vised, Davis shift­ed to using modes (the sev­en modes of mod­ern music) as the basis for song struc­ture. With­out need­ing to get over­ly tech­ni­cal with music the­o­ry, you can under­stand imme­di­ate­ly upon lis­ten­ing to the album that modal com­po­si­tion allowed Davis and his band to slow down, sim­pli­fy, and cre­ate sub­tle, com­plex shifts in mood that can be at once lilt­ing, cool, and kind of… blue. Davis had exper­i­ment­ed with blues-based modal forms before. Here, he inte­grates that knowl­edge with clas­si­cal ideas and impro­visato­ry bril­liance.

“As is now part of jazz folk­lore,” notes Ford­ham, “the New York ses­sions that pro­duced this remark­able album were com­plet­ed in a hand­ful of takes over just a few hours, with a min­i­mum of com­po­si­tion­al mate­ri­als.” From there, a rev­o­lu­tion. It is “The most exquis­ite­ly refined of ambi­ent music,” writes Richard Williams in his defin­i­tive mono­graph The Blue Moment, and the one record many music fans would res­cue “from a burn­ing house.” It may be the best-sell­ing jazz album of all time. Steely Dan’s Don­ald Fagen called it “the Bible.” Quin­cy Jones called his “orange juice,” because he lis­tens to it every day

“No one could dis­agree with Williams when he con­nects this with the devel­op­ments of John Coltrane,” writes Sholto Byrnes, from his “shock­ing demo­li­tion of the dain­ty brick­work of Rodgers and Ham­mer­stein’s ‘My Favorite Things,’ ” to his mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme. Its influ­ence, accord­ing to Williams, runs through the work of Ornette Cole­man Steve Reich, John Cale, the Vel­vet Under­ground, James Brown, Sly Stone, Soft Machine, Bri­an Eno, Moby, and so on and so on. If you’ve nev­er quite under­stood what makes Kind of Blue so great, get a crash course in the video explain­er above. Then sit down and lis­ten to it a few hun­dred times.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 65-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Miles Davis’ Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Jazz Albums

Miles Davis Dish­es Dirt on His Fel­low Jazz Musi­cians: “The Trom­bone Play­er Should be Shot”; That Ornette is “F‑ing Up the Trum­pet”

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme (1964)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness