The Refugee All Stars

The Great Plotnik was a working musician for several decades, and the thing he probably hated the worst about it was the complaining.

The clients:
The drummer's too loud! The singer's too soft! What, another break? You don't know how to play the Zalbonian National Anthem? Play New York New York! Don't play New York New York! There's no food! You're fired!

The musicians complained too:
The lights are too hot! I can't hear myself! What? New York New York again? Turn ME up! When are we gonna get fed? I'm a singer, I don't have to carry my own mike. I'm a superstar, I can play whatever I want. Sorry I'm late. I have to leave early. If John Coltrane hadn't forgotten my phone number I wouldn't be here. I hate this job. I hate you.

Maybe that's part of the reason Plotnik loved 'The Refugee All Stars' so much. He and Ducknik saw the documentary last night. What a story. What an outrageous wake-up call about why music matters.

These half a dozen or more guys (and one woman), refugees from a revolution in Sierra Leone, where both sides killed and tortured indiscriminately, were now living in a refugee camp in neighboring Guinea and getting together to play music because there was absolutely nothing else to do, when the documentarists, two kids from Middlebury College, found them. One refugee, Reuben, was the writer and singer, and another, Franco, had a guitar, and another, Black Nature, could rap a little bit. Somebody found an old P.A. system and someone else had enough money to buy a gallon of gasoline to power a decrepit generator to get power for the P.A. and guitar. The music flowed.

The songs are about whatever is going on their lives -- sleeping on tarpaulin mats, missing their country, all the dead and maimed friends and parents and children. One of the band members, Mohammed, was forced by rebels to...you may look away here...pound his own child to death in a manner that Plotnik will not descibe.

Ten years of war and nobody can remember what the fighting was all about.

Go see 'Refugee All Stars.' But maybe don't buy the CD in the lobby -- it's badly recorded, and the band's flaws are 'way too obvious. But in the film the music soars, in the same low budget way Paul Pena soared in Genghis Blues, in the same way Jimmy Cliff soared in The Harder They Come. The footage is grainy, the first time filmmakers don't really know what they're doing, the camera goes right into people's faces and the Krio pidgen dialect is hard to follow. But the music takes you to another place, where for a few hours there is nothing in the world to complain about, fools, we've got a story to tell and a song to sing and there's gas in the generator. Walk away singing.