Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The Best Music Video I Have Ever Seen...

This is probably the best music video I have ever seen on the interweb. The amazing thing is, I almost didn’t watch it. Then, I noticed that it was done by an organization called playingforchange.com. So, I gave it a shot. WOW, is all I can say. Be sure to watch the entire video all the way to the end. It’s truly a well-constructed piece.

To give you a little background on it, this cover of Stand By Me was recorded by completely unknown artists, mostly street musicians, in a street virtual studio all around the world. It started with a base track—vocals and guitar—recorded on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California, by a street musician called Roger Ridley. The base track was then taken to New Orleans, Louisiana, where Grandpa Ellitott—a blind singer from the French Quarter—added vocals and harmonica while listening to Ridley's base track on headphones. While still in New Orleans, Washboard Chaz's added some grooving metal percussion to it.

Then, it gets a little crazy, the producers took the resulting mix all through Europe, Africa, and South America, adding new tracks with multiple instruments and vocals provided by local street musicians, that were then assembled into the final version in this video. All of this was done with a basic laptop and a few microphones.

OK, so maybe not the best music video on the interweb, but certainly the best version of Ben E. King's classic I've ever heard in my life. And if you’re like me, you’ve heard a bazillion of them.


Playing For Change | Song Around The World "Stand By Me" from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

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