Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a mixture of synergy, opportunism, and fuzzy feel-goodness coalesce into a phenomenon quite like the story of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. The group formed in 1999 at a refugee camp in Guinea, where thousands of Sierra Leone natives had fled a brutal civil war at home. The band initially played for other refugees, which wasn’t exactly a careerist move. But lo and behold, in 2002 a pair of budding American filmmakers, looking for a story amid the tragic displacement, stumbled upon the band. Bingo! A star is born.
I certainly won’t begrudge the band’s heartwarming success — even if it’s a perfect example of being in the right place at the right time — but there’s no doubt that their triumph is based largely on extramusical stuff. The band plays at Martyrs’ on Saturday, November 4.
