![\"Alan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Alan-Gilbert.jpg\")
Alan Gilbert performing with Unintended Consequences playing in Hell\u2019s Kitchen. Photo: Catie Savage<\/p>\nAlan Gilbert, the tuba player whose unmistakable brass lines became part of the unofficial soundtrack of Hell\u2019s Kitchen, died suddenly at home on Wednesday afternoon, November 19. He was 76.<\/p>\n
Alan Gilbert performing with Unintended Consequences playing in Hell\u2019s Kitchen. Photo: Catie Savage<\/p>\n
A Broadway veteran with credits that included Crazy For You and My Fair Lady, Gilbert was best known to West Siders not from the stage but from the sidewalk. He lived on W51st Street between 8th and 9th Avenues since the 1970s, and for decades could be found performing on neighborhood corners, festivals and parks \u2014 most recently at the HK45\/46 Fall Fest just two Saturdays ago.<\/p>\n
I first encountered him in July 2015 at the corner of W49th Street and 9th Avenue, where he and fellow brass player Tom McHugh were playing tuba\u2013euphonium<\/a> duets as Two Budz \u2014 \u201csay it fast and the joke comes through,\u201d friends like to note, since they were essentially a pair of tubas. By the time we crossed paths again at the 9th Avenue Food Festival in 2018, Gilbert had helped launch a new chapter: a busking trio that would become Unintended Consequences<\/a>.<\/p>\n Alan Gilbert and fellow brass player Tom McHugh were playing duets as Two Budz. Video: Phil O\u2019Brien<\/p>\n \u201cWe were playing in the subway when Randy Witherspoon, head chef and proprietor and previously a dresser on Broadway for 30 years, heard us,\u201d Gilbert told W42ST at the time. \u201cHe approached us and said, THIS is the sound I want in the restaurant I am opening. We have been there ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n For more than two years before the pandemic, the group became the house band at SpoonFedNYC \u2014 performing just steps from Gilbert\u2019s apartment and cementing their role as what former W42ST editor Ruth Walker once called \u201cour favorite neighborhood band.\u201d<\/p>\n Unintended Consequences grew out of those early duets: McHugh on euphonium, Gilbert arranging, and actor-musicians Richard Kent Green and later Matt Baker joining on banjolele and percussion. They played Occupy Wall Street rallies, parade gigs, and eventually a rotating lineup of trombone, saxophone, mellophone and flugabone. Even after SpoonFed closed, the group remained a fixture \u2014 performing at the reopening of Mathews-Palmer Playground, block parties, and five consecutive HK45\/46 Fall Fests.<\/p>\n![\"YouTube](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1763871729_790_hqdefault.jpg\")
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