Playing For Change: busking for peace around the world

Last week I posted about the THRU YOU project and the delicacies of it’s youtube mash-ups. Well today I discovered a similar amazing project called “Playing For Change” produced by two film-makers (Mark Johnson and Jonathan Walls) who traveled the world during many years with loads of audio equipment in search for little-known talented buskers. Mark and Jon’s idea was to record street musicians from all around the planet playing a single track of a song, and then mixing all the tracks together to obtain a fully produced version of the song.

The result is truly amazing:

This song, called ‘Don’t Worry’, was written by Pierre Minetti (the French guy you see at the beginning of the video) and performed by at least 20 musicians from India, Spain, France, Congo, South Africa, the USA and the Netherlands.

Here’s a beautiful cover of Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’ performed by 37 musicians from the Netherlands, Brazil, Spain and Russia, among other countries (8 millions views on YouTube since November).

Playing For Change isn’t only about the music. The whole concept is based on communicating a message of peace, harmony, and reunion. The idea behind ‘Playing For Change’ came to Mark Johnson when he saw 2 monks perform in the NY subway. Amazed by how the audience, a crowd of people who had never met before, was hypnotized and focused on the same music, Johnson started recording buskers in different US cities.

It occurred to me that here is a group of people that would normally run by each other, but instead, they’re coming together. And it’s the music that brought them together [...] The result (of Playing For Change) is a movement connecting the world through music. [...] Just thinking in my mind… what would be unique instruments to juxtapose against each other that had never been heard before: a talking drum and a tabla, they’re very similar but they never really come together, or a sitar and a dobro, very similar but how often do you hear them play together? The idea was to go to places that would have some sort of instruments that they could add to the spectrum of the global music that we were trying to find.

Playing for Change created a foundation that actively engages in humanitarian projects. They are currently working on building a music school in Gugulethu, South Africa as an alternative to the violence the residents face daily, along with an online platform to help promotes its future student’s music. The PFC foundation is also rebuilding Tibetan refugee centers as well as an arts center near Johannesburg.

Whats more. PFC project is releasing a CD/DVD package and documentary called “Peace Through Music” in April 2009 through Hear Music (Starbuck’s music venture). The film includes Bob Marley’s “War/No More Trouble”  featuring U2′s Bono, and “One Love” played by 35 musicians accompanied by Manu Chao amongst other songs. (“Peace Through Music” is PFC’s second movie: their previous film, titled “Plating For Change: A Cinematic Discovery Of Street Music” was released in 2005, and is currently available through Netflix).

You can pre-order the packages on PFC’s website here, and also buy “Stand By Me” and “Son’t Worry” on iTunes.

PFC is also organizing gigs as well as planning an international tour with some of the musicians from the films (they even played at SXSW last week). They call upon the help of volunteers, musicians and donations to grow their community with hopes to spread joy, enlightenment and peace throughout the planet.

We live in very exciting times maybe, but they are equally as cynical. The sentence above is easily perceived as an overly-optimistic and puerile vision of today’s world, yet it fully corresponds to Playing For Change’s tone and ambitions. Such positivism is something we seldom come by these days… The quality of their concept, the sheer amount of work and risk injected into the project and the activities of their foundation  really makes me want to believe every word of it.

Mruff.

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How busking can be used as a promotional stunt for your shows

And yet some more news on Oasis! While Noel was recuperating from his fall last week at the Toronto show, the band kept active promoting their new album.  They hired buskers to perform some songs in various locations of New York last Friday since they had to cancel a show due to Noel’s injuries.  The event was a collaborative effort with New York’s city officials and Warner Music, the band’s label.

Much like the idea of leaking music sheets, Oasis didn’t come up with busking as a means of promoting an album or an event either, but have put it to good use.

Sony BMG hired buskers to sing Johnny Cash songs In  the London metro stations to promote the release of the artist’s greatest hits album ‘Ring of Fire: the Legend of Johnny Cash’ in 2005, and re-enacted the marketing scheme a year later with the movie ‘Walk The Line’. They also used buskers for a Eurythmics’s greatest hits release in 2006.

Another example is Working Title Films, that employed 25 buskers to wear ‘Love Actually t-shirts’ and sing ‘All We Need Is Love’ for the release of the movie ‘Love Actually’ (I hadn’t heard of the movie either, but you get the idea :)

From a business point of view, buskers are usually highly skilled artists that entertain people day in and day out, so to use them as a promotional vector is a clever move. Their ability to attract attention is key to having an audience focus on something real, something that they will remember. A month ago we posted a youtube video of a street musicians named Terry Prince who sold 15,000 CDs in a little over a year playing only part-time. He probably wouldn’t have sold as much records going down the traditional route of playing clubs, and that has something to do with the intimacy he creates with his audience. The more intimate the interaction between the artist and his public, the more feedback he is gonna get. Musicians playing house concerts feel the same way and most agree that the public’s response in terms of validation and generosity is increased in an intimate ambiance.

The Scottish band Travis drew a crowd of hundreds of amazed shoppers when they busked in 2004 to raise awareness of Shelter Scotland and raise money for The Big Issue, both charity funds for the homeless. They were also just about to release a greatest-hits collection at the time but I don’t like to think is was purely promotional, it’s a good idea to correlate both events.

Whether it be to promote your next show or just to get out in the sun and play, busking probably won’t be a waste of your time. I stumbled across a list of famous musicians who have been known for playing the streets. Pretty cool anecdotes.

mruff.

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