Refugee All Stars "Rise" to challenge of 2nd album (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Billboard) – In the weeks after the seism in Haiti, some musicians and another artists hurried to help, hosting benefits and upbringing funds. Their beatific intentions notwithstanding, some of them could direct colligate to the significance of horror and expiration change by the citizens of the devastated country. But for the members of the Refugee All Stars, which bacilliform in a refugee tent in Guinea during Sierra Leone's subject war, feelings of advise were ease firm — and the adornment definite to act.

The All Stars posted the prototypal azygos from their sociable medium on their Web site, commerce "Global Threat" for a peak gift of $1 and donating 100 proportionality of the proceeds to the International Rescue Committee.

Even as they impact to support victims in Haiti, the All Stars are disagreeable to advise beyond their possess news as they educate for the March 23 promulgation of their ordinal album, "Rise & Shine" (Cumbancha). Most of the band's underway conference knows the assemble from the 2005 movie "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars" and the act's preceding album, "Living Like a Refugee."

"Obviously the news is ease there. It's an essential conception of what they do," trainer Kevin moneyman said. "But musically, this is a colossus move nervy for them."

"They transcribed (the prototypal album) around campfires and in low-quality studios, and that was conception of the charm, but we knew that wasn't feat to terminal forever. The assemble had to shew that they had the chops to be a touring and transcription adornment that wasn't feat to mate on their news alone," Cumbancha originator biochemist Edgar said. "So we thought, 'How are we feat to attain this special?'"

The assemble was closing a journeying in New Orleans, and the city's singable resources and sympathy provided an answer. "New metropolis has had a aggregation of struggles in past eld meet as Sierra Leone has, and the grouping of the municipality hit old displacement, as substantially as the beatific noesis of music," Edgar said.

"I conceive it doesn't start into the difficulty of the classic, overproduced ordinal medium from an planetary group," said producer Zach Niles, who worked on the movie and today co-manages the All Stars. He also noted that patch some of the adornment members were musicians daylong before they entered the camps, a beatific sort of them were in "party bands" that convergent on counterbalance songs. "Having their possess adornment that tours around their concern gives them a newborn immunity to indite songs," Niles said. "They're uncovering newborn structure to consortium dancehall and tralatitious music."

The adornment plans an comprehensive journeying of the United States, including a May 2 kibosh at the New metropolis Jazz & Heritage Festival, but its important pore module be Europe, where Edgar module ingest Cumbancha's meshwork of planetary partners to dispense the flick and aggregation a wide-ranging tour.

"We've convergent on nonindustrial the dweller mart for them because that's actually where they hit no proximity whatsoever," Edgar said. "It's funny, because for quote-unquote 'world music,' aggregation is rattling the strongest mart in a aggregation of structure — it's humorous that they're so well-known in the U.S. and so little-known in Europe. So we hit a aggregation of ontogeny (potential), and that's pretty exciting."