The Power of Music: Mark Johnson and Playing for Change

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It’s impossible. A horn section in Burkina Faso backs a string quartet in Lyon, France, together with guitarists in Nepal and Madrid while a choir in Manila supports the singer in Haiti and an African kora soloist, and we aren’t halfway through the video. Everyone plays outside, in city streets, courtyards, in front of temples, in marketplaces, train yards, beaches, jungles and deserts, visuals that immediately impart a compelling sense of that place. Each player brings nuances from their own musical culture, resulting in a fresh and distinct feel. One could write a book just about these rhythmic confluences. As a Playing For Change Foundation school teacher observed, “it’s where all cultural diversities collide into one beautiful harmony.”

Informed by years of recording studio experience and powered by his love and utter faith in music, Mark Johnson pursued his vision of traveling songs around the world to bring people together.  Along with co-founder Whitney Kroenke Silverstein, they’ve grown a single such video, “Stand By Me,” into an international movement. It’s a new art form, a sound engineer’s vision. And in this moment that finds us isolated by Covid and wounded by the toxins coursing through our social media, they prove that such technology can also unite through the intimacy and immediacy of music.

The hundreds of songs he’s recorded and filmed take many forms. Some for the pure joy of  music, some for healing by embracing different sides within a violence-torn country like Colombia, or between musicians at home and expatriated across the world as with Cuba, or between Israelis and Palestinians, or only with children. In the process they have recorded more than 1200 musicians in over sixty countries, generated over a billion YouTube hits, created a touring band, founded the Playing For Change Foundation — a separate 501(c)(3) organization that currently supports fifteen music and arts schools in eleven countries,  and partnered with the UN for a global virtual event in celebration of their 75th anniversary.

Today we talk with Mark about how he made all this happen, building schools, producing concerts and especially his trust in music and what it’s like to circle the globe with songs in search of musicians and dancers.

Please check out both their organization and foundation websites (links in the show notes below) to read about their many awards, videos, partners, and supporters.   

“It’s an unbroken chain of human connectivity, one to the next that keeps going around and around the world.”