Playing For Change - Songs Around The World

Playing For Change began a decade ago, the brainchild of Grammy-winning music producer and engineer Mark Johnson. "I was in a subway in New York on my way to work, and I heard these two monks playing music," he recalls. "They were painted head to toe, all white, wearing robes. One was playing a nylon guitar, and the other was singing in a language I didn't understand. There were about 200 people who stopped to watch, didn't even get on the train. Some had tears in their eyes. And it occurred to me that here is a group of people that would normally run by each other, but instead they're coming together. And it's the music that brought them together." For 10 years Johnson and his team traveled the globe, with a single-minded passion to record little-known musicians for what would become Playing For Change – its name evoking the coins thrown to street musicians as well as the transformation their music inspires.

Utilizing innovative mobile audio/video techniques, Playing For Change records musicians outdoors in cities and townships worldwide. They've traveled from post-Katrina New Orleans to post-apartheid South Africa, from the remote beauty of the Himalayas to the religious diversity of Jerusalem. The performers' talents are captured in a myriad of environments – under the sun and beneath the streetlights... in public parks, plazas, and promenades... in doorways, on cobblestone streets, amid hilly pueblos. Their performances are subsequently combined in allowing them to collaborate – albeit separated by hundreds, or even thousands, of miles.