It Ain't Just Chump Change: Playing for Change and "Gimme Shelter"

I've spent the better portion of my life now trying to get a handle on this elusive term "community." When I graduated from college, I joined a volunteer organization whose four pillars were community, social justice, spirituality and simple lifestyle. I lived in a community of people, all of us doing work in inner-city Milwaukee with not-for-profit organizations, and we tried to build community. In that case, community meant pooling our resources, collaborating with each other, sharing common duties, and above all listening and interacting with each other in a shared vision. I did this for two years, and I realized that community is hard. First of all, community is based around consensus, and it is very difficult to reach a consensus once you get past two people. Either someone is going to obstruct because they don't get what they want, or someone is going to roll over to appease everyone and be secretly angry that they didn't get what they wanted. Since then, I've tried to modify what community means. Can one be in a community while living apart from people? We call our neighborhoods, our towns, even our cities "community" but when you add numbers, it seems to me that elements of true community go away. I'm still trying to find a happy medium because I think that ultimately, a real community could bring me a lot of happiness but, it has to be something less than living with people and getting stuck with their bathroom mess, and something more than just a cluster of buildings together.

One description of the Playing for Change project is that it is building a world community through music, and certainly it has some of those aspects of community. It has a collaborative vision, it has brings together diverse people, and the product that results is an intermingling of many talents. It also probably has to have some top-down organization - I'm not sure a consensus was reached on the songs that they play. However, even if it isn't a community in the strictest sense of the word, I think I can live with it because man, do I like the music and I love the concept.  And I really love this cover of The Rolling Stones Gimme Shelter.

Playing for Change is project to connect the world through music. Created by American producer and sound engineer Mark Johnson, the project records musicians around the world playing one element of each of the songs they record. They then build, layer by layer, the song by melding the recorded parts, each with the individual interpretations of the musicians involved. They have since developed the Playing for Change Band which tours, and they have built the Playing for Change Foundation, which funds the construction of music and art schools around the world. In this video, you'll see the contributions of a variety of musicians recorded in their countries including:

Greg Ellis (United States)Venkat (India)Roberto Luti (Italy)
Washboard Chaz (United States)
Roselyn Williams (Jamaica)
A.S. Ram (India)
Sidney Santos (Brazil)
Tamika McClellan (United States)
Mamady Ba Camara (Mali)
Massamba Diop (Senegal)
Sherieta Lewis (Jamaica)
Courtney "Bam" Diedrick (Jamaica)
Sean "Pow" Diedrick (Jamaica)
Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars (Sierra Leone)
Seenu M. (India)
Taj Mahal (United States)
Andrae Carter (Jamaica)
Char (Japan)

You can find Gimme Shelter on the album PFC 2: Songs Around the World (2011) - it is a CD and DVD combo.  Playing for Change's version is dedicated to all the lost, homeless and forgotten people in the world.