Playing For Change: Same Chord, Different Country

Tuesday May 03, 2011

From State of the Re:Union

Same Chord, Different Country
By: Tina Antolini

Oh, the glories of Facebook. Intimate connection to people we know and those we don’t, procrastination device, and collecting ground for all sorts of digital materials that might not otherwise cross our paths. Some of these are idle entertainment (see: poodle playing piano), but others, well, they might just resurrect your sense of the possibility for peace and understanding in what often can feel like a hopelessly brutal world. Yes, a video can do that. For an afternoon’s length of time, at least.

The concept of the video that inspired this in me is quite simple: a band of musicians jamming on a blues riff in the key of G. Doesn’t sound so revelatory? How about if each of these musicians is in a different country, each playing their own instrument—from sitar to Japanese shamisen to New Orleanian washboard—and the song they create is a multicultural hybrid, a testament to both the awesome diversity of human musicality and the commonalities that, in the end, root us all together. The video I’m talking about is Playing for Change’s “Groove in G.”

It includes a Malian rock band, a flamenco player in Spain, the American blues guitarist Keb’ Mo’, a Brazilian berimbau player (that’s a single-stringed percussion instrument that looks like a giant bow with a gourd at one end), a variety of Indian percussionists— the list goes on. What struck me was not just the world tour of musicians that the video provides, many of them playing outdoors wherever they live, but how seamlessly their music weaves together. Whatever our musical background, a blues chord in G is a blues chord in G. And this is the deeper idea behind Playing for Change, a project that’s been crisscrossing the globe for years now, recording street musicians: that, as their website says “music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. No matter whether people come from different geographic, political, economic, spiritual or ideological backgrounds, music has the universal power to transcend and unite us as one human race.”

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