In all my years of recording music, she’s one of the greatest singers and people I’ve ever met. You just feel this invitation to come and join her on the journey. But also it’s her energy, her feeling of joy, that comes through the track. She’s just one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. Yeah, she was 78 years young when we filmed her on that balcony in Havana, and I have chills every time I hear her sing. Tell me about Teté Caturla Garcia, who is so great when she starts singing. And it also really kind of captured that Cuban magic that we wanted to start this track. Once we had Pancho playing the song, we knew musicians around the world would love to play on it. So it was really sort of serendipity and destiny. And within a few hours, we were set up in a plaza, recording and filming him on the tres. We explained what Playing for Change is all about. So we just went in there, we introduced ourselves to him and his wife. And one day, we’re literally walking down a side street in Havana, and there’s Pancho walking into a cafe. We were trying and trying, and nobody could get ahold of him. And so our dream was to find Pancho, and we went to Cuba, and we couldn’t find him. But we did know about the first musician you see in the video, his name is Pancho Amat and he is a living legend considered to be the greatest tres player in the world. We went to Cuba with the crew, and we had no real plan as to who we were going to record.
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Let’s add all different musical instruments from different cultures and unite them all together.” So the Cuban tres, sort of their Cuban guitar a Middle Eastern oud, the Middle Eastern guitar and then a kora in West Africa - combining all these different elements kind of helps take the song to another level, and introduces all these different instruments and shows the world how well they work together. And so “Chan Chan” was really an extension of that experience, and wanting to work on a project that starts in Cuba: “OK, let’s take a great song from Cuba. It gave me a much deeper understanding of the amazing music and the culture that comes from Cuba. That song had featured like 70 Cuban musicians living in different parts of the world, and uniting them all back together through a song. So that was the theme here for “Chan Chan.”Ī few years ago, I worked with Jackson Browne when he produced a version of “ Guantanamera” around the world.
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The idea here is for people to just look at how well we all get along when the music plays.
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It was an exciting song to take around the world.īasically, you know, all of our videos are about connecting people, and showing how music transcends the things that divide us in life, like politics and borders. Yeah, this one was a little more cinematic. Here, Johnson talks about the extremely lucky circumstance that led them to scoring a Cuban guitar legend, why he took a risk on traveling to Beirut for the video, and more. The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio System So we thought, ‘Well, why don’t we try to take this track from Cuba, and go around the world and add musicians? Because we knew it’s a song that people sing, sort of as an anthem all over the world.” Johnson and his team started in Cuba, tracking down local legends such as Teté Caturla Garcia and Pancho Amat, before traveling everywhere from the U.S. One of them is Bob Marley’s ‘ Three Little Birds.’ And another one is ‘Chan Chan.’ I’ve just heard it sung in so many cultures, usually when I’m traveling to Spanish-speaking countries. “There’s just a few songs that you hear performed all over the world on the street. Johnson has recorded music in more than 50 countries with Playing for Change, which has 15 music schools across 11 countries. Many of those streams happened in the past month Mark Johnson, co-founder of Playing for Change, who made the video, suspects it became “a tool for people in isolation.”įor their first video since “The Weight,” Johnson and his team chose the Cuban classic “ Chan Chan,” popularized by Buena Vista Social Club in 1997. It’s been streamed more than 8 million times on YouTube. Last year, Robbie Robertson played “The Weight” with musicians around the world, including Ringo Starr, Japanese guitar virtuoso Char, Congo soul singer Mermens Mosengo, and others.