If you can’t view this video, click here. It’s SO good!
I was listening to NPR Monday morning (aren’t you impressed? doesn’t that make me sound smart?) and I heard an interview with Mark Ridley, the guy who came up with the concept for the ‘Playing for Change” album – an album of street performers all over the world.
Basically, one day Mark heard a street performer in Santa Monica singing Stand By Me.
“I approached him after the performance and said, ‘Hey, if I come back in an hour with some recording equipment and cameras, I’d love to record you, film you, add musicians around the world to it,’ ” Johnson says. “And he looked at me really funny, sort of thought I was crazy. But he said, ‘OK, if you come back, we’ll do it.’ “
And he did. He took Roger Ridley’s Santa Monica performance and took the tape over to some legendary New Orleans street performers. He would put headphones on them so they could hear Ridley’s version and play and sing to it.
The song always starts with Ridley, then Johnson puts headphones on Grandpa Elliot in New Orleans, then plays those recordings for a tribe of Zuni Indians to add a drum, and on and on for a total of “37 other musicians that never met around the world.”
The final result is what you see and hear in this video. Very cool. Makes me smile. Hope it makes you smile too.
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May 7th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
And you can download the song and/or album on iTunes.
December 16th, 2011 at 11:50 pm
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December 17th, 2011 at 2:14 am
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