Playing For Change: Peace Through Music has been called a Global Phenomenon in the way it touches everyone connected with the project and attracts new audiences around the world. Following its award-winning documentary that ran on PBS-TV throughout August of 2009, PFC launched a nationwide tour at The Birchmere in suburban Washington, DC. The subsequent cross-country exposure quickly attracted over 20 million hits on You Tube of the video performance of "Stand By Me" and the CD debuted in Billboard's Top Ten. Not surprisingly, the band members won ardent supporters when they appeared live on major television news and talk shows.
This summer, PFC performs in New York City's Central Park and the Hollywood Bowl before heading to London, Paris and the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam. The ensemble returns in time to headline the Vancouver Folk Festival in mid-July.
The improbable undertaking began in 1999 when Grammy winning producer/filmmaker Mark Johnson met Jonathan Walls, collaborator on a history documentary for the National History Museum of Singapore and winner of an Asian TV Award for editing a reality-based series for MTV Asia.
"Our initial goal was to raise money for a film about the lives of street musicians in America," Walls says. "We began by filming street blues singer Roger Ridley in Santa Monica performing the song 'Stand By Me.' Then we went to New Orleans and discovered blues singer Grandpa Elliott who added the harmony."
Their modest venture quickly evolved into a peace project that took then overseas to film and record more than a hundred street musicians. In the beginning, they followed their noses and began to conceptualize as they went. Traveling with light-weight digital gear, they were drawn to performers in unexpected places. Walls recalls discovering Los Patricians in an open-air market in Spain by following the crowd to their exuberant music. In like manner, they happened upon a choir in South Africa, a cellist in Russia, a soul singer in Amsterdam, Native American drummers on a reservation, and the Three Exile Brothers in Dharamshala, India, the northern tip of the country where Tibetan refugees find solitude.
Their improbable journey took Johnson and Walls from Capetown, South Africa to Dublin, Ireland and from Katmandu, Nepal to Tel Aviv, Israel, 12 countries in all. Along the way, they filmed and recorded outdoors in cities, parks, and villages and collected a retinue of musicians hitherto unknown outside their communities who headlined England's Glastonbury Festival.
The band resonates with the power of people yearning to live in "Peace Through Music." Each performer has a story, perhaps none more unique than that of elderly singer/harmonica player Grandpa Elliott, who had not ventured outside his hometown of New Orleans in 50 years. Walls and Johnson were walking in the French Quarter with their equipment when they heard his booming voice and trailed it until they found him. In a city vibrant with good musicians on every corner, he stood out. Now enjoying experiences he never could have imagined, Grandpa Elliott is a member of a touring band that travels this country and Canada in two large buses, one for the equipment and instruments, the other for the performers and crew.
Walls reveals that future plans involve touring Europe and South Africa with the musicians they initially discovered there. Along with bringing together people eager to achieve peace through their mutual love of music, PFC has established a separate non-profit organization to build music schools for children worldwide, the most recent in Mali. The possibilities, it appears, are limitless.
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