About four years ago, when I was rooting around for Chinese music videos, I was sent a charming animation from a band called Shanren. The song "30 Years" was about the trials and tribulations of moving from the country to the big city to look for work. This is a motif that resonates with all working folks, and I won't even go into the hundreds of great songs dealing with this from the West's Industrial Revolution right through to today. "30 Years" describes what is going on in China currently, as its rapid industrialization is causing a vast shift in population from rural to urban centers. I was therefor already interested when I was contacted by the band's publicist, informing me that they would be playing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at Pianos.

The band comes from Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, with members from the Wa and Buyi minorities. The name Shanren means "mountain men." During a chat with James Pang, the band's Chinese manager, he mentioned that the people of these minorities live up in the mountains, are kind of wild living, like to brew their own liquor, and dance.

Being a lover of country music and bluegrass, I could not help but start drawing parallels between some of the characteristics of our own folk heritage and what I was about to see and hear. I was not let down. Listen to this music and tell me that you don't hear something that sounds remarkably like our own "Old Timey" music, with its trance-like repetitions. People like banjoist Abigail Washburn have been mining these parallels for years, and you can hear why. (The band even uses something that looks mighty like a banjo!)

The song is called "Left Foot Dance of the Yi".

The Yi people, as I mentioned before, are one of the ethnic minorities of southwestern China. There's a family of songs called left foot dance songs ("kind of Yi party music" their manager Sam Debell writes). This is the band's own arrangement of a very well known left foot dance song. It’s usually a circle dance, but the band adapted it, so they do it in a line (in a circle it must look positively Balkan... but I’m not going to get into that, at least not here).

A sample of the lyrics (xianzi is a stringed instrument):

- Brother play the xianzi.
- Sister sing the song.
- The moon is already risen.
- And we're waiting to dance.

And something from our own repertoire:

"Late in the evening about sundown
High on a hill and above the town
Uncle Pen played the fiddle, lordy how it would ring,
You could hear it talk, you could hear it sing."

To contact the band:
Sam Debell (Asia) at unitysam@gmail.com and +86 152-1027-0868.

For more of Michal's original music videos, visit inter-muse.com

On Earth Day the Atrium at Lincoln Center presented Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez's Electric Kulintang. Both of these well-known Downtown musicians have been involved in researching the indigenous culture of the Philippines, and have been working on a film about their efforts called "Song of the Bird King." I had tried to find examples of Filipino "roots music" a number of years ago with very little success, and in this film (a fragment of which was presented that night) I heard some spine-tingling stuff, so I am really looking forward to the film's completion and getting the full immersion! The film focuses not only on the challenges of keeping a culture alive in the face of globalization, but on the physical degradation of the ecosystem that has supported life on the island, affecting man, fauna and flora.

Electric Kulintang call their music "Eco-Electronica." Rodriguez is the partner percussionist, programmer and beatmeister, while Ibarra plays drums and various xylophones as well as the Kulintang, a traditional Philippine instrument comprised of a series of gongs, and reminiscent of those found in an Indonesian gamelan. The concert debuted material from their forthcoming CD "Drum Codes" which Ibarra describes as "musical stories and dedications to ancestors and the environment." This video is of "Drum Code #3," which they presented toward the end of their set. Ibarra says "I play on the Philippine Kulintang gongs, Taggungo style. This traditional Southern Filipino Maguindanaon style is performed in respect to spirits and used in healing."

Electronica, as Rodriguez composes it, contains an invitation to trance that is an appropriate matrix for the shamanistic meditations inspired by the Kulintang. One could focus on the musician's performance, but the experience was also interactive with the Atrium itself. Rodriguez' digitally generated sounds resonated into and off the various surfaces of the hall, creating a cocoon for Ibarra's percussive, minimalist motifs, and I could easily imagine the music as an installation piece. I have brought many architectural images from the Atrium itself into the video, as this seemed the best way to convey the experience as a whole , including one of the Green Walls (living tapestries of plants) that adorn the Atrium. I recommend listening to this video with headphones, to get the full effect, as there are some subtle electronic sounds that are fairly low in the mix.

Rodriguez and Ibarra are engaged citizens of our planet whose music attempts to express how our inner and outer worlds relate. Electric Kulintang's merging of ambient/shamanistic/experimental music was a singularly appropriate programming choice for Earth Day.

I knew I couldn't be the only person doing video journalism in world music. Sure enough, meet Toni Polo, founding member of the Groovalizacion collective, and co-director of the webradio www.groovalizacion.com who is also a filmmaker. He recently contacted me about a series of short portraits he is doing of artists in Bamako, and I found them to be charming and informative. Most of the pieces will need subtitling, but he sent me a few that already had English subitiles, so here is an engaging look at a duo from Italy and Cape Verde who seem to read each other's minds.

Duonde, músicas populares de Brasil a Cabo Verde from Toni Polo on Vimeo.

About Groovalizacion radio:
24h Internet radio about multicultural vibes, peripheral music, suburban grooves, nomadic sounds, tribal and regional blends... These are the soundtrack of migrations and cultural fusions, the voices of ethnic groups which animate our cities. Music is a white flag brandished at racial tensions, insufferable religious or economic wars and the closure of borders....Groovalizacion breaks the digital frontiers and brings people together: artistes, listeners, displaced citizens. Also with podcasts, videos, agenda and articles in Spanish, French, English and Portuguese.

Some of the most exciting musical collaborations are happening between jazz, classical and world musicians these days. Musicians have always fed off interaction with other players, but the sheer variety of music that is available coupled with access to international artists has led to some truly exquisite sounds. In the classical world the work of Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble and its spinoff collaborations between Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider come to mind, and of course, the by now venerable Kronos Quartet and maverick violinist Giles Apap. In the jazz world the same foment is apparent (the kora seeming to be the instrument of choice these days, appearing alongside jazz heavies) and when the world music extravaganza of GlobalFEST blew into town in January, it brought Nguyen Lê's "Saiyuki" with it.

Lê's name is practically synonymous with polyglot music; witness allaboutjazz.com describing his 2006 CD "Homescape" as a combination of  "post-Hendrix rock, Milesian harmon-mute free improv, Maghrebi trance music, Ellingtonia, ambient, a Papua New Guinea vocal choir. . .Delta blues, Vietnamese folk tunes, flamenco, Iranian modes, a Sardinian choir, Australian aboriginal ritual music, French chanson, Gregorian chant, and Indonesian gamelan/gong music." The man is eclectic, and joyfully so.

"Saiyuki," his latest aggregate, is a trio. In it, he has brought together Mieko Miyazaki (Japan) on koto and Prabhu Edouard (India) on tablas. (Lê played his backups in mid to low range to fatten up an otherwise treble sound.) The group's performance was one of the highlights of GlobalFEST, and I'm glad I got a chance to catch it on video, even with the uneven sound, and video quality attendant on these kinds of situations. . .note the shattered glass sound from the bar. . .oh well.

Each player brought so much of their own culture along that at times it seemed more like the music was "jazz enabled," with that form giving the musicians a more liberal harmonic matrix and greater freedom to fly. But the end result was something unusual and hard to classify; I guess "world music" as a term still has its uses.

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.