- artist:Chris Hedge
- release year:2005
- country:USA
- formats:CD (Compact Disc)
- record posted by:Triloka Records
- label:Triloka
It’s about lives. Real lives. Lives lived in unending desperation. Boys and girls, trapped on the savage streets of great cities, searching for sanctuary from bondage, slavery, and prostitution. Men and women struggling to feed their children, or heal the wounds of their pasts, or escape the oppressions of a harsh and unfeeling world. It is also about a new kind of hero. An extraordinary individual who somehow combines the heart of a saint with the brain of a CEO. For these social entrepreneurs not only can the world be made a better place, but they believe they know the path to get there. The New Heroes, a PBS miniseries, celebrates some of the greatest of these social entrepreneurs, capturing them on film as they do their work in the hard places of the world – the slums of Brazil, the slave camps of India, the brothels of Thailand – as they forever search for the newest solutions to the oldest problems.
Chris Hedge was the only composer ever considered to create the soundtrack for the series. He brought to the project not only a lifetime immersed in the music - gleaning from every source around the globe and through his work with such luminaries as Chico Freeman and David Grisman, Congolese master drummer Titos Sompa, legendary flutist Paul Horn, the Kronos String Quartet, visual artist Scott Dewar and Neil Young - but also a passion and commitment that in time became as deep as that of the heroes themselves. From the start, Hedge believed that the people in these stories should not be merely the subject of the music, but the music itself. Towards that end, he assiduously gathered the sounds of the world; from the traffic noise of a teeming city to the night sounds of the wilderness, the laughter of children, the everyday hum of commerce, and, not least, the chorus that is the backdrop of every second of modern life. Most of all, Hedge collected the voices of the heroes themselves: their passion, their pragmatism, and sometimes even their despair and Hedge treated these sounds and voices as if they were themselves an instrument of a billion tones and colors.
The New Heroes – and Chris Hedge – takes us on a journey of hope, a spiritual journey, a musical journey across continents from India and Kenya to Brazil and California, a journey full of drums and voices, recorded sounds and virtuoso musicianship by the likes of flautist Paul Horn, violinist Julian Smedley, sarod player Alam Khan, tabla expert Debapriyo Sarkar, African percussionist Titos Sompa and Hedge himself. It is a journey into the world as one…in harmony.