I have nothing against the idea of the latest fundraising video for Haiti because the cause is certainly a great one; it's just that I tire of the usual bevy of First World entertainers belting it out. That's why it's refreshing to meet someone like Mark Johnson, one of the founders of Playing for Change.  By now you've all probably heard about this organization through the widely seen globetrotting video of "Stand By Me." The first time I saw it, I thought it was pleasant enough, but what was it for, what was the next step -- what was the substance? Mark clarified it all for me in an eloquent interview, in which he laid out a vision for using music as a catalyst for social change. I've heard my share of pie-in-the-sky blah blah about using music for this or that, but Mark's ideas are not dreams -- they are based on solid reality and hard work.

Can any of us deny that one of our greatest achievements to date is our unprecedented technological connectivity? Playing for Change is not just about making pretty videos. It's about connecting a global community where access to medicine, education, and mutual respect are a given.

I had a conversation many years ago with Christoph Borkowsky, one of the founders of the World Music Expo, WOMEX. At the time he said to me that the music of every nation should be treated as a natural resource. He chafed at the lack of market exposure great world artists got, and was certain that significant revenue streams could result from a level, truly international marketplace. Now that a new generation can access global content with ease, perhaps the idea finally has the proper soil in which to grow. And perhaps the next great musical outpouring of support for a cause will well up spontaneously, from another part of the world, and have a truly international face and sound.

This post covers a lot of territory: electronica, performance art and hip hop!
Lim Geong was the first person I absolutely knew I wanted to interview when I went to Taiwan, because his work is right up there with the best electronica, and it always retains a strong Asian flavor.  His story is unusual too, in that he started out with huge success as a pop singing star, and rejected that role to, as he says, "go from the front of the stage to behind the scenes."  He has since scored many movies, and even appeared as an actor in quite a few. To me, he's practically a metaphor for what Taiwan has gone through: he expressed the freedom from martial law when he sang his big 1990 hit "Marching Forward" and then followed his star reaching out to the rest of Asia and the world, with music of the digital age.

On the other hand, the gentle acoustic venture "A Moving Sound" is the baby of Scott Prairie and Yun-Ya Hsieh, aka Mia. Mia studied interdisciplinary arts with Meredith Monk in the USA where she met Scott, and together they have  brought the rather Western concept of performance art to the island, bringing dance, theater, music and plenty of audience participation together.

Hip-hop is of course no stranger to Taiwan, but Kou Chou Ching are the pre-eminent conscious rap band there. I first learned about them through their wonderful video "Black Heart", a computer-generated animation based on Chinese puppet theater (still a high art in Taiwan) and flavored with both classical and traditional sounds. But the song is an indictment of amok capitalism that creates the black-hearted businessman, who in turn sends poisonous products into the marketplace. Kou Chou Ching is gradually tuning in Taiwanese youth to the need for more engagement with their world.

We tend to think of Taiwan mostly in terms of its relationship to China. But there are eleven different aboriginal tribes still dwelling on Taiwan, some going back 7000 years.  Amazingly each one of the tribes is distinctive from the others in customs and language. What unites them is their common marginalization, as various successive powers have attempted to "normalize" them into the ruling or majority culture. Many have held on to their identities, and still live in the mountains, valleys and plains of the island. Inka Mbing, an Atayal, was forced to leave her village at a young age in order to make a living in Taipei. But a lifetime later she is at the forefront of preserving the culture of her tribe. Her voice can be powerful and heartbreaking at the same time, and she is not without adventure, as I heard that she and the Nanguan singer Wu Hsin-fei (see Taiwan Journey Part 1) have been known to jam, and wonderfully, too. By contrast, the rock band Totem is made up of young bucks from different tribes -- Paiwan, Ami and Taitung -- and they have an unapologetically commercial sound. That's okay, it's what they love, and the songs -- which can be about leaving home for the city, or the pleasures of tribal life -- also retain some of the melodic elements of their folk music. They've had some decent recognition at home, and won the music competition at the Ho Hai Yan Rock festival in 2004. In the lead up to that, they were part of the documentary "Ocean Fever." After listening to their records, which have quite the "wall of sound" production, I think I can safely call my video "Totem Unplugged."

There is no way that I could have covered all the different aboriginal music in Taiwan in the five days I was there. Suffice it to say that if any of this music piques your curiousity, there's plenty more to be heard! I recommend checking out the catalogues of Trees Music & Art, Wind Music, and David Darling's striking recordings with the Bunun tribe, "Mudanin Kata."

My thanks to the very knowledgeable David Chen for his commentary.

In 1999 on the southern tip of Taiwan, where the majority population of Hakka Chinese had settled, the government planned to build a huge dam. The Hakka farmers went to the capital city of Taipei to protest. The dam, they said, would destroy the ecosystem, and was a risky enterprise considering the earthquakes and landslides the area experiences. (I was there during an earthquake...not pleasant.) Lin Sheng Xiang, a Hakka from the village of Meinong, and pursuing a musical career near Taipei, became involved with the struggle to prevent the building of the dam. He moved back to his hometown in Meinong, and the Labor Exchange Band was formed, giving a musical voice to the movement, and the dam was never built. Although the Labor Exchange band is no more, Lin Sheng Xiang has continued to create thoughtful music along with lyricist Zhong Yongfeng. When I interviewed him in the bucolic south of Taiwan, he played a Hakka folksong, a charming song he wrote about his daughter, and a song (co written with Zhong Yongfen) from his latest CD,"Growing up Wild" the concept of which is songs about females.

I was surprised that Lin Sheng Xiang's name came up as often as it did when I interviewed musicians and record people. And although no one ever called it "protest music" everyone acknowledged the call to social responsibility and greater awareness that his songs contain. Our own Woody Guthrie's songs reach out to the heartland, touching on family values and love of the land. I think there is a brotherly resonance in the songs of Lin Sheng Xiang.

My colleague Fernando Gonzalez has graciously contributed this exclusive eulogy for Mercedes Sosa who passed away last week. We both agreed that the video of her performance of "Todo Cambia" captures her passion, charisma and the love she elicited from her fans. Thank you, Fernando.

Mercedes Sosa

By Fernando Gonzalez

For an artist, becoming a political symbol is a double edged sword.
Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa, who died of in kidney failure in Buenos Aires on October 4, at age 74, was for many Mother Courage, The Voice of the Americas, The Mother of the Americas, The Voice of the Voiceless, and more.
Sometimes obscured by the mythmaking was the fact that she was an extraordinary artist.
A short, stocky woman, with Indian facial features and jet black hair (she was nicknamed La Negra, the black one), Sosa possessed an extraordinary alto voice, rich and powerful but also remarkably expressive. She could go from a whispered love song to a rousing flag-waver with stunning ease. Sosa was not a songwriter. But, quoting an old line, when Sosa sang a song, it stayed sung. She made her own songs such as “Gracias a La Vida,” “Alfonsina y el Mar,” and “Maria, Maria,” even when the songwriters were themselves major figures such as Violeta Parra and Milton Nascimento. 
She performed usually sitting center stage – although before health problems pretty much confined her to a chair on stage, she would also get up and dance, a memory perhaps from when Sosa was a teenager in Tucumán, a province in Argentina’s northwest, and she was a teacher of folk dances.
She started as a traditional folk singer but soon she was part of a group of poets and musicians who were, sometimes literally, rewriting folk music with what became known as Movimiento del Nuevo Cancionero, the New Song Movement, updating the standard folk lyrics to address the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. It set the tone for her entire career.

 “We were looking for a different poetic language, and musically we looked at jazz,” she once explained. “We spoke from truth and poverty, but didn´t forget about the landscape, because we didn’t want to grow apart from the people. They called us communists because any revolutionary act provokes fear and culture is the most important revolution. Governments don’t last. Culture is the greatest power.”
Notably, and especially after her return to Argentina in 1982 after a three year self-imposed exile, Sosa not only maintained a progressive attitude regarding the lyrics but applied it to her music, collaborating, for example, with rockers such as Charly Garcia and Fito Páez, and opening her repertoire to young, sometimes unknown, songwriters.
In recent years, in 1997 and again in 2003, she struggled with various health problems. In ‘97 the situation was so dire that, she acknowledged years later, she wrote her testament. Her problems in 2003, including severe depression, kept her off the stages for two years.
Sosa died after 13 days at the hospital. Her illness canceled plans to present a new two-disc set of duets featuring an all star cast of collaborators including García, Páez, Shakira, Julieta Venegas, and Joaquín Sabina. (It was released in the U.S. as one disc including selections from the two volumes.) It was, appropriately, called “Cantora,” singer.
For all the names she was called, this was the only title Sosa claimed for herself.
"Sometimes, one is made to be a big mouth or some sort of Robin Hood and it's not like that," she once told me, in the 90s. "I am a woman who sings, who tries to sing as well as possible with the best songs available. I was bestowed this role as big protester and it's not like that at all. I'm just a thinking artist."

The Hip Hop Hoodios are a unique band who layer Latin and American Jewish cultures over rap. We've broadcast their videos "Ochos Kandelikas" and "Gorito Cosmico" and thoroughly enjoyed the band's cheesy, smart (and smartass) attitude.  I really like their latest video "Times Square," but it simply won't fit into the definition of "world music" with a shoehorn. And you KNOW I'm a moderate when it comes to that category. But still, the subject is close to my heart, so I'm presenting it here anyway. 

I went to high school in Manhattan, on 46th Street and 6th Avenue, and so I have watched the gentrification of Times Square with a combination of nostalgia and unease.  I don't know if it makes sense to mourn the passing of an area that was admittedly dangerous and seedy. It's easy to say the place has "lost its edge" and is now totally "Disneyfied." Yet, for some reason, I do feel that there is something that has been lost...and what about the ongoing re/de-construction on the Bowery (lower 3rd Avenue) where a new generation of young professionals will soon be living in renovated flophouses? On the bright side, maybe they can exorcise the sad karma of a million ruined lives. But what has happened to those souls who used to inhabit both of these urban areas; the impoverished, the hopeless and the addicted. Where do they go now? Is our trend towards gentrification simply putting a bandaid over a larger social wound?

For those of you who love Desert Blues, that loping, hypnotic guitar music that we associate with the Tuareg and the Saharawis, consider this: The electric guitar has reshaped traditional Saharawi music, but the situation in the refugee camps grows more dire every day, with fewer and fewer guitars for young people to play, thus further endangering an already endangered cultural legacy.   
Got an electric guitar that is gathering dust somewhere?  Want to put it to truly good use? Check this out!

Okay, if you've gone to the URL above, you know that this is a great site.
It's maintained by my old friend Angel Romero, and it's a terrific resource for what is going on in world music, and as you can see, what is happening on many tangential levels.

This just in from a friend who thought it was worth sharing.  He's right.
Istanbul's Sulukule, the world's oldest Gypsy settlement, known for its music & dance clubs, is being demolished by developers to make way for gentrification. If you have ever been entranced by the sound of Turkish Roma clarinet, read this and weep.

Good-bye, Gypsies: The Loss of 1,000 Years

Rupa, who fronts the April Fishes is certainly a multi faceted creature. A doctor, a musician, a painter, a linguist, she is someone who doesn't just sing about life, she plunges in with both feet.  She spent quite a bit of time talking to me in New York about the various bandmembers and singing their praises (sorry Fishes, I didn't use that stuff --and readers, it IS an excellent band!) but eventually we got down to some of the subjects that drive her.

A documentary about the band's trip along the border between Mexico and the USA is in production.

On another note, there is a very moving video that while as commercial as it gets, cuts to the heart. It is an homage to Neda, and all the young people who have demonstrated and suffered during the recent government crackdown in Iran. The majority of people living in that country are now below the age of 30-- Possibly the largest demographic on earth of educated young people to be held back by their own government. These days we all know we are watching history when we watch Iran.

The ripples continue to spread outward.

In the next week or so, we will be adding interviews with Chico César (Brazil), Jorge Nasser (Uruguay) and Aterciopelados (Colombia) to our series “Music for Human Rights.” In each case we have outreached to the artists for more photos and contacts and had to do plenty of research after the actual interviewing, to make them all good television journalism. We received wonderful photos from Jorge of his rock n’ roll days complete with Telecaster, and Chico sent us a heartwarming family photo. And while one doesn’t always relish the research, sometimes it is an enriching experience all its own; looking up “Uruguayan Dictatorship,” “Landless Movement” and “Escopitarra” I found myself drawn into the multitude of Latin American historic and contemporary issues. (And the picture just gets bigger with each lead). Perhaps the most intense vector involved our interview with Emmanuel Jal, who had such an electrifying part in our “Price of Silence” video. As a Sudanese child soldier seeking refuge from the horrors of war, he was singled out by Emma McCune, a young British aid worker, who was responsible for putting him on the path to a better future. Googling her name, she emerged as a figure of extreme controversy, and in my outreach to find photos of this mysterious person I was put in touch with her mother Maggie. Not only did Maggie send me extraordinary photos of her late daughter, but she sent me a book she had written about her own journey to find herself within her daughter’s death. It’s fascinating reading, and I feel as if I now know some truths that no amount of info-surfing could ever yield.  I love this job!