Finding singer-songwriter Barclay Martin in a crowded bar is easy. As the doorman at Crosstown Station says, Martin is the guy who looks like Jesus.
At a table chatting with friends, Martin bears an uncanny resemblance to the Christian savior. His dirty-blond hair dangles well past his ears, a week's worth of stubble coats his angular cheeks, and his conversational demeanor emits a halo of inner peace amid the bar's neon lighting.
Martin's band, the Barclay Martin Ensemble, is known for a sound as relaxed as its namesake. Martin strums acoustic, folky tunes that meditate on life. His verses wander off course, coming back to a warm hearth of jazzy pianos and soft cymbal crashes. His searching lyrics are questions — quiet, unanswerable propositions between friends.
Martin has never walked on water. Nor has he parlayed a few servings of bread and fish into a feast fit for a small Mediterranean population. But Martin's trips to the Philippines in recent years have resulted in a story that is definitely inspiring.
In 2006, Martin was contacted by the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, an international organization that aids the world's poor through sponsorships. CFCA invited him to write the score for, and act as the music director of, a documentary. The proposed film would trace the planning and staging of a concert in Zamboanga, a port city of the Philippines located on a peninsula between the Moro Gulf and the Sulu Sea. The goal of the concert was not only to make for a good communal celebration but also to unite the area's youth through traditional Filipino music.
"We settled on this concept to do a secret concert for the CFCA community and basically the most marginalized poor in the area," Martin says.
Two years later, in January 2008, roughly 10,000 people of all ages would gather for the outdoor concert.
To appreciate the feat, first imagine attracting that many people to a concert, period. Then imagine doing so without any advertising. No fliers. No press. Only word-of-mouth. Not even a formal building in which to house the music.
Now imagine putting on the show in a region troubled by sporadic violence, perpetuated by competing Muslim and Christian faiths, and imagine convincing Filipino young people to abandon their fondness for Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera for ancestral music many have never heard.
"I didn't know what I couldn't do," Martin says.
CFCA is a lay Catholic organization headquartered in Kansas City, Kansas, with 250,000 members worldwide, according to Martin. Although its mission statement indicates social goals that are rooted in the Gospels, its actions, Martin says, have little to do with evangelical conversion. Through donations, the organization allows its members to sponsor children and elderly persons who suffer from poverty in developing countries. According to its Web site, CFCA helps families "put food on the table and send their children to school." Martin estimates that CFCA sponsors approximately 50,000 people in the Philippines.
Martin's partnership with CFCA may have been happenstance, but not his fascination with the world's peoples. Until Martin was asked by his friend Paul Pearce, director of international programs at CFCA, to help brainstorm the documentary project in 2006, Martin passed his time by playing music and studying sociology.
His interests led Martin to study in places such as Ecuador, the Galapagos Islands and England.
"Travel has always been my greatest teacher," he says.
One year, alone in an Ford Econoline van, Martin took a nine-month, cross-country tour through the Pacific Northwest, upper Midwest and Hawaii (he parked his van at a friend's house in California and flew) to promote his solo album Promise on a String. "I was basically a hobo on fossil fuels," Martin says.
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