THE NEW HEROES
Liner Notes
Michael S. Malone

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. The sick and old and forgotten, praying for salvation.

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, who dreams of changing the world, yet never forgets to pay the gas bill. They are the spiritual descendents of people like Florence Nightingale and Albert Schweitzer, but their attitudes and techniques are as modern as the latest management textbook. For this new hero, it is never enough to rescue one slave, or teach a single AIDS orphan to read, or restore sight to a blind beggar – no, that act must be perfected, systematized and duplicated . . .until it can be repeated a thousand times, until a million such acts transforms the very structure of society itself.

For these men and women – call them changemakers, or better yet, social entrepreneurs -- not only can the world be made a better place, but they believe they know the path to get there. Some are businesspeople, others are teachers or scientists or social activists or politicians. And some can only be described as angels in combat boots. But wherever they come from, all share one thing: an unquenchable optimism in the face of often impossible odds. Nothing can stop them from fulfilling their vision – not even death.

“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 career rich in time spent in the exotic corners of the world, 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 – both the social entrepreneurs and the people they saved – 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, he collected the voices of the heroes themselves: their passion, their pragmatism, and sometimes even their despair.

Hedge treated these sounds and voices as if they were themselves an instrument of a billion tones and colors. Then he brought together old friends -- performers he knew would, as kalimba drum artist Titos Sompa says at the opening of the show’s theme, “Listen. And Imagine.” Virtuosos like flautist Paul Horn, violinist Julian Smedley, sarodist Alam Khan, and tabla expert Debapriyo Sarkar.

These remarkable musicians didn’t just play; they also watched: preparing for a session, the men viewed a screening of the story of Kailash Satyarthi, the man who faces death every day rescuing India’s debt bondage slaves. The images of the raid itself are excruciating. Watching them, both Khan and Sarkar were torn with grief for their homeland and their people. That grief fills the mournful opening movement of the "India Suite" -- and their hope for the future rings out in the rollicking finale. Their performance is matched by an exquisite violin solo by Julian Smedley.

For all of its diversity of styles and forms, the entire New Heroes soundtrack can also be heard as a single, coherent work of art. It opens with the haunting melody of the title track, played for the first time as a simple acoustic figure. This is the world as innocence. It won’t last for long.
“A Common Song” then takes us to Children’s Town in Zambia, a home for AIDS orphans. We hear the morning bell and the clear, well-enunciated voice of a teacher. For the powerful and powerless alike, the day has begun.

The next two tracks fling us around the world, traveling even faster than the morning sun: to Argentina, where Fabio Rosa, economist and “The Last Gaucho” struggles to bring electricity to the poorest farmers of the Pampas; then to the horrors of the Thai borderlands, where coldhearted parents sell their daughters to the bars and brothels of Bangkok . . .and Sampop Chantraka risks his life to rescue them.

Then to India, and the tears and hope of the “India Suite”, followed by the stirring and exotic processional, “In Good Faith”. This track is an homage to the one of the greatest of the new heroes, Muhammad Yunus, inventor of micro-loans to the world’s poorest of the poor.
We now return, at the center of the composition, to the New Heroes theme. This time it is more dissonant and chaotic, yet also more exciting and complex – it is the world as troubled. The world all of us live in today.

Then we are off again, touching down in India, Kenya, and even California. The last, “OK, OK”, from the Delancey Street Project in San Francisco, has the smokey, jazzy feel of lost men huddling in foggy, wet alleyways, trying to both make amends and make good after a life of crime and prison. It is the music of last chances.

Then, when all seems lost, a turning point. It arrives like a beam of light, of revelation, in the middle of “Provider”. Fabio Rosa stands in the rain, seemingly defeated at last in his dream to bring single wire electricity to the rural poor of his country. Suddenly, he has an epiphany: sunlight itself is the answer. Solar power. In the face of human ingenuity, no obstacle is too great to be overcome.

That too is the theme of “The New Hope”. Approtech is a company that, as its name suggests, develops technologies that are appropriate to the limited means of people in the developing world – in this case, inexpensive, foot-operated water pumps. These devices may sound simple, but they have already begun to transform the economies of East Africa. By the same token, Paul Horn’s exquisite performance using four different kinds of traditional and modern flute, is its own kind of appropriate technology. To this listener, nothing captures the spirit of the new hero better than Horn’s unique flute, made from the wing bone of an eagle and given to him by a Native American shaman. Pure and free, the music of aspiration, it flies above the dark world below, seeing before anyone else the light of the coming dawn.

Finally, Chris Hedges’ masterwork: “The Voices.” This is his Joycean moment. Atop a driving rhythm track of Ferdinand Batantou and his African drum students, Hedge lets each of the twelve heroes speak in turn. It is not a pastiche, but a conversation – between extraordinary people who have never met, but who share a common vision. Many voices in many places that meld to become one: the true voice of the human heart.

The composition ends, as it began, with the New Heroes theme. But this time, it is in the sweeping and uplifting form of the opening to the series itself. The drums, the voices, the musicians and the recorded sounds all combine at last . . . into the world as harmony.

-- Michael S. Malone