Jason Mraz mixes education, entertainment for 70,000 turnout

Jason Mraz mixes education, entertainment for 70,000 turnout  

By Nuam Bawi | Monday, 24 December 2012

http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/lifestyle/3639-jason-mraz-mixes-education-entertainment-for-70-000-turnout.html

Around 70,000 music fans flocked to People’s Square east of Shwedagon Pagoda on Sunday, December 16 to enjoy a concert by two-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Jason Mraz, supported by a cast of some of Myanmar’s most accomplished musicians. The crowd estimate was according to a press statement released by the concert’s organisers, MTV Exit, the day after the event, which was aimed at not only entertaining the audience, but also educating people about issues related to human trafficking.

At a press conference held at Summit Parkview Hotel a few hours before the concert started, Mraz said he has had some experience working with survivors of human trafficking, and he felt it was “important” to be part of the concert in Yangon.
“We are expecting about 50,000 people today, and who knows how many more — hundreds of thousand, millions of people — will watching the programs, series and documentaries that will follow,” he said.
“If the people see that, they can say, ‘I know what that is now’ or ‘I’ve seen that this is happening’. People are waking up every day to the issue [of human trafficking].”
He added that after he goes back to the US, the experience of playing in Yangon will stick with him for a long time.

“It’s going to stick with me, what we will be able to accomplish here today. I’ll be able to tell people about the things I saw and music I heard. The story will be told and more people will know about this place. And those are the best souvenirs.”
The excitement generated by the concert was obvious even before the gates opened at 4pm, as a big crowd gathered of people keen to secure places close to the huge stage.
Among the local musicians who performed were R Zarni, Lynn Lynn, Sai Sai Kham Hlaing, Phyoe Gyi, Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein, Chit Thu Wai and Chan Chan, with backing music provided by The Trees.
Slot Machine from Thailand played about six songs, while Mraz and his band belted out more than 10 tunes, ending with “I’m Yours”, his most famous song among Myanmar fans.
The huge crowd was generally enthusiastic about the show.
“No world-famous singers come to Myanmar, so I was curious to see what kind of performances there would be at this concert,” audience member Htut Myat Thu told The Myanmar Times at the venue

“Up to now I’ve only seen these kinds of concerts on TV. This is the biggest concert I’ve ever seen in my country. I’m so excited.”
He added that it was the first time for Myanmar singers to perform alongside a world-famous act, which revealed some of the weaknesses of the local music scene.
“There are many differences in the level of performance between local singers and international acts. I hope the local singers can do better next time,” he said.
On Tuesday, December 18, just before he left Yangon, Mraz toured Shwedagon Pagoda, met with survivors of human trafficking and filmed with MTV EXIT for an upcoming television special.
The Yangon concert will be broadcast internationally on MTV on Wednesday, March 13, 2013

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People’s Square earns its name following Jason Mraz crowd
What initially attracted me to the Jason Mraz concert in Yangon on Sunday, December 16 was the fact that tickets were free, and the venue was within easy walking distance of my apartment in Sanchaung’s Myaynigone ward.
But there were a few other pleasant surprises along the way, including the rare opportunity to walk down the middle of Pyay Road (closed to traffic for the event) without getting run over by an out-of-control bus; and the chance to guzzle as many litres as I desired of free Coca Cola at the concert, as long as I was willing to wade through the ever-deepening piles of discarded soft-drink cups to get a refill.

I arrived just before 6pm, ignoring the skuzzy scalpers selling free tickets for K2000 each, squeezing through the tiny crack in the front gate of People’s Square, and entering one of the most spectacular concert venues on the planet, with the illuminated Shwedagon Pagoda supplying the dramatic backdrop.
Chan Chan was the first performer, and she turned out to be one of the highlights of the first group of singers, most of whom delivered two songs each. Chan Chan made a dramatic entrance with a group of lotus-bearing dancers, and won over the crowd in her normal way: with her nice voice, nice smile and nice pop songs.
The entertainment then took a precipitous dive into a trench of sub-middling sluggishness, kicked off by Sai Sai and his tepid brand of hip-hop lite. At best he can be considered Myanmar’s answer to DJ Jazzy Jeff, but his appearance managed to grab the attention of the small gaggle of 12-year-old girls standing in front of me.

Chit Thu Wai was up next — she’s the antithesis of the angry young woman, with a sweet face and sour voice that together make her the poster child for why actors shouldn’t assume they are good singers just because they’ve been on TV.
 Gifted singer-songwriter Lynn Lynn went onstage next, shining an all-too-brief beam of light into the dimness. It’s a shame that a real musician such as Lynn Lynn was allowed to perform only one song while lesser talents were accorded more respect by the concert’s organisers.
Singer Phyoe Gyi marked a return to the forgettable. There was one song about a radio or something, but the toothless quality of the music ensured the complete absence of any lasting impression. 
Local diva Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein spearheaded the ascent from the trench. As usual, she took the stage born aloft on a platform and wearing one of her ultra-baroque outfits that have led lazy observers to compare her with Lady Gaga.

But there’s really no resemblance: Unlike Ms Gaga, the Myanmar singer dwells in a safe-for-the-whole-family realm where contentious social boundaries are not pushed, and raw sexuality is kept well under wraps — usually beneath dozens of metres of fabric that make up many of her costumes.

It’s also worth noting that outlandish costumes were a staple of Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein’s onstage persona for years before anyone anywhere in the world had ever heard of Lady Gaga.

As for her performance, Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein normally takes a while to get warmed up — her first song was plagued by flat spots and brave but failed attempts to hit some very low notes — but once she gets going, her voice becomes a remarkable, unrelenting force that has justifiably earned her the status of one of the greatest singers in the country.

R Zarni is another local entertainer with an awesome voice. He is a man who knows how to rock, in a 1980s glam-metal kind of way. Mark my words: If a big-name director ever makes a feel-good summer movie about the hunky, glamorous fighter pilots of the Myanmar Air Force, an R Zarni song will surely provide the rousing soundtrack as the final credits roll.
Then it was time to change the drum kit — thank god. The local tradition of having the same backing band (in this case The Trees) play throughout the night for a host of different vocalists is a real plague on Myanmar’s concert scene. Despite the constantly rotating singers, this practice results in an overall sameness to the music — after a few songs it all starts blending together.

So after a couple hours of musical uniformity, I was primed to hear the decidedly more robust sounds that emanated from the speakers when Slot Machine took the stage. These well-dressed lads from Bangkok are clear products of the New Romantic resurgence, and I wondered if their band name was intended as an homage to the Las Vegas-based group The Killers, who are an obvious influence.
The band delivered a decent performance, playing through a half-dozen likeable if unsurprising alt-rock songs, and demonstrating the virtues of putting sweat into developing the sort of solid stage presence that so many Myanmar bands seem to think is unimportant, to their detriment.
Musically speaking, Jason Mraz has never struck me as being all that special (I’m sure his mom, who according to the song “93 Million Miles” wants him to move back home, would disagree): His reggae-tinged pop tunes, while occasionally catchy, border on the redundant, and it can be difficult to stomach his “everything’s just super-awesome for everyone” spiel.

Still, it’s tough to sustain strong feelings of dislike for such an obviously swell guy, unless you’re a sociopath who drives around in a pickup truck looking for cats to shoot with your composite bow. I mean, props to anyone who gives shout-outs to the birds in roughly half his songs, and even the squirrels score a long-overdue mention in “Only Human”.
The duet with Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein on “Lucky” was a charming highlight of the hour-long set, and a few of the more upbeat songs had the audience swaying their torsos and waving their arms to the sensible rhythms.
The musicianship throughout the set was nearly flawless, and the band undoubtedly brought a level of professionalism to the stage previously unseen in Myanmar. Perhaps this will inspire local acts to tighten up and improve their game.
 Above all else, though, there was something very moving about seeing such a concert in People’s Square.

Up to 2005 — before the grand opening of insta-capital Nay Pyi Taw — the big, open square east of Shwedagon saw use once a year, as the site of the cloistered and heavily guarded Armed Forces Day ceremony presided over by the militarists who misruled the country for too long.
 Back then, it would have been tough to imagine a group of musicians turning it into a space worthy of the name People’s Square, where tens of thousands of Myanmar could hear and applaud songs about freedom, revolution and self-realisation, without having to flee to another country to do so.
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ODC perform in Yangon

ODC perform in Yangon
By Yadana Htun(Volume 26, No. 510)
http://mmtimes.com/2010/timeout/510/tm51001.html
OBERLIN Dance Company from the US performed a series of contemporary dances at the American Club in Mayangone township on February 9.
The group’s performance covered three themes: “Origins of Flight”, “Something About Nightingales” and “24 Exposures”.
The first theme was performed mostly by dancers Daniel Santos and Anne Zivolich, and was commissioned by Evelyn Feintech in memory of her husband, Norman. It sought to convey the power, joy and pathos of a long and generative relationship.
In “Something About Nightingale”, the group presented a dance inspired by nature.
“24 Exposures” highlighted the trajectory of the company’s 30 year artistic evolution from everyday movements to virtuosic dancing.
Before the end of the concert, the company of ten dancers (five men and five women) also danced kabyarlut, some of the basic elements of Myanmar traditional dance, which the company learned during their stay in Mandalay where they performed on February 5.
“Myanmar traditional dance is very particular and very beautiful, like a beautiful flower. Every movement is special and hard. The dancing looks like your letters as the way you write is round,” said Ms Brenda Way, founder of the ODC dance company.
“Myanmar traditional dance is particular in hands but our dance is in the feet. In our dancing, the movement of the arms is throw-away style. We have two very interesting traditions: flamboyant and precious like jewels,” she added.
During their stay in Yangon the dance company also met with students from Gitameit Music Centre, holding workshops. Before its arrival in Myanmar, the company performed in Indonesia.

Members of the ODC dance company perform at the American Club, Yangon on February 9. The company also took the time during their stay in Mandalay to learn the basics of Myanmar traditional dance. Pic: Aye Zaw Myo
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႐ိုးရာအကကို တန္ဖိုးထားဖို႔ အသိေပးခဲ့တဲ့ အိုဒီစီ
ရတနာထြန္း-အတြဲအမွတ္ (၂၃ ၊ အမွတ္ ၄၅၃)
http://www.myanmar.mmtimes.com/2010/timeout/453/to04.html
သူတို႔ရဲ႕ ကိုယ္ေနဟန္ထားက ႂကြက္သားေတြေၾကာင့္ က်စ္လ်စ္သန္မာ ေနပါတယ္။ ကကြက္ေတြကို ေဖာ္ထုတ္ ကျပတဲ့အခါမွာ အဲဒီသန္မာမႈကို ေကာင္းေကာင္းအသံုးခ်ၿပီးေပ်ာ့ေျပာင္းတဲ့ ကကြက္ေတြအျဖစ္ အသြင္ ေျပာင္း လုိက္တဲ့အခါမွာ ဒီေန႔ အေမရိကမွာ နာမည္ႀကီးေနတဲ့ အိုဒီစီ အကကုမၸဏီ ကိုနာမည္ေက်ာ္ၾကားေစတဲ့မူပိုင္ကဟန္ေတြျဖစ္လာေစပါ တယ္။
႐ိုးရာ ဘဲေလးအကကို အေျခခံတဲ့ ေမာ္ဒန္အကေတြကို တစ္ဦးခ်င္းစီရဲ႕ အရည္အခ်င္း၊ အဖြဲ႕လိုက္ညီညြတ္မႈနဲ႔ကျပတဲ့ အိုဒီစီအဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖမႈ ကို ေဖေဖာ္၀ါရီ ၉ ရက္ေန႔ ညေနခင္းက အေမရိကန္ကလပ္မွာ ျမန္မာ ပရိသတ္ေတြ ၾကည့္႐ႈခံစားခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
စ စခ်င္းမွာေတာ့ အိုဒီစီရဲ႕ ကကြက္ကဟန္ေတြက ဒီကပရိသတ္နဲ႔ လံုး၀ အစိမ္းသက္သက္ပါပဲ။ သူတုိ႔ ဘာကို ေဖာ္ျပခ်င္တယ္ဆိုတာကို ကကြက္ ေတြနဲ႔အတူလိုက္ပါစီးေျမာရင္းနဲ႔မွ တျဖည္းျဖည္းခံစားမိတာပါ။ အဆြဲ၊ အသိမ္း၊ အပင့္၊ အက်ေတြနဲ႔ ကကြက္ေတြက အားမာန္ပါသလို ကေဖာ္ကဖက္နဲ႔ အခ်ိတ္အဆက္မိဖို႔ စိတ္ခံစားမႈကိုလည္း အစြမ္းကုန္ႏွစ္ထားရပံုပါပဲ။
ေယာက္်ားေလး ငါးေယာက္၊ မိန္းကေလးငါးေယာက္ပါ၀င္တဲ့ အိုဒီစီအက အဖြဲ႕ထဲကDaniel နဲ႕ Anne တို႕ကို အဓိကထားၿပီး ကျပခဲ့ တဲ့ Origins of Flight မွာဆိုရင္ လင္မယားႏွစ္ဦးအတူေပါင္းသင္းခဲ့စဥ္ကအမွတ္ရစရာေတြကို အဓိကအကပညာရွင္ႏွစ္ဦးရဲ႕ကကြက္ ေတြနဲ႕အတူ ေနာက္ခံအခုန္၊ အက်ကကြက္ေတြရဲ႕ပ့ံပိုးမႈနဲ႕ ပံုေဖာ္ထားပါတယ္။
ကပြဲညကတင္ဆက္တဲ့ကႀကိဳးသံုးခုထဲကဒုတိယတစ္ခုျဖစ္တဲ့ Something about Nightingale မွာေတာ့ေတးဆိုငွက္ေလးရဲသဘာ၀ ကို လႈပ္ရွားမႈသြက္သြက္ေတြနဲ႕ပံုေဖာ္သြားပါတယ္။ သဘာ၀ဆန္မႈကုိ သ႐ုပ္မွန္တင္ဆက္ကျပတဲ့အခါ လက္ေတြရဲ႕ လႈပ္ရွားမႈ၊ ေျခ ေထာက္ေတြရဲ႕ အေရႊ႕အေျပာင္းနဲ႕ တစ္ေယာက္နဲ႔တစ္ေယာက္ အေပးအယူမွ်မွ်ကိုင္ထိန္း ကျပသြားတာကို ပရိသတ္ေတြ အႀကိဳက္ ေတြ႕ မဆံုးျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။
တတိယပိုင္းျဖစ္တဲ့ 24 Exposures မွာေတာ့ ေန႔စဥ္လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြကေန ထူးျခားဆန္းျပားတဲ့ကကြက္ေတြ ဖန္တီး ကျပလို႔ ရႏိုင္တယ္ ဆိုတာကို ခႏၶာကိုယ္ အတိမ္းအယိမ္း၊ အေရြ႕၊ အေစာင္းေတြ နဲ႔ ကျပပါတယ္။

ဒီထက္ပိုၿပီး ပရိသတ္ကို ေက်နပ္အားရေစတာက မႏၲေလးမွာ သြားေဖ်ာ္ေျဖခဲ့တုန္းက သင္ယူခဲ့တဲ့ ကဗ်ာလြတ္အကကို ျမန္မာအက ဆရာမနဲ႔အတူ ကျပေဖ်ာ္ေျဖသြားတာပါပဲ။ သူတို႔ပင္ကို ဟန္ေတြမေပ်ာက္ေပမယ့္ ျမန္မာအကကို ႀကိဳးစားကျပ သြားၾကပါတယ္။ 'ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ဒယ္နီရယ္ပါ' 'ကြ်န္မ ဗန္နစ္ဆာပါ' လုိ႔ တစ္ေယာက္ခ်င္း ျမန္မာလုိ ပီပီသသႀကီး ႏႈတ္ဆက္လို႔ ပြဲသိမ္းခဲ့ေပမယ့္ သူတို႔ မိတ္ဆက္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္ကဟန္ေတြက ပရိသတ္ ရင္မွာက်န္ရစ္ရွင္သန္ေနခဲ့ပါၿပီ။ အိုဒီစီရဲ႕ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖပြဲမွာေခတ္ၿပိဳင္အကုိ ျမန္မာလူထု ၾကားမွာ အစပ်ဳိးႏိုင္ခဲ့သလို မေမ့အပ္တဲ့ ႐ိုးရာအကေတြကိုလည္း တန္ဖိုး ထားထိမ္းသိမ္းၾကဖို႔ သူတုိ႔ရဲ႕ကဗ်ာလြတ္ကဟန္ေတြကေန တစ္ဆင့္ သတိေပးခဲ့တယ္ဆုိတာျမင္သာေစခဲ့ပါတယ္။

Japan-Mekong exchange opens

 The Japanese duo Anmitsu, formed by Yuka Annaka and Kumi Kindaichi, played at the Grand Ballroom of Yangon’s Chatrium Hotel on February 6 to kick-off the Japan-Mekong exchange. Pic: Aye Zaw Myo
Japan-Mekong exchange opens
By Zon Pann Pwint and Than Htike Oo
http://www.mmtimes.com/no458/t001.htm
IT is a harsh country, deep in snow in the winter, but also a beautiful one, a land fragrant with apple trees. And its music, the string music of Aomori-ken in northern Honshu, Japan, is both haunting and dynamic.
Last week a Myanmar audience had the chance to hear the sounds of Aomori when the Japanese duo Anmitsu, formed by Yuka Annaka and Kumi Kindaichi, played at the Grand Ballroom of Yangon’s Chatrium Hotel on February 6. The occasion was the opening event of Japan-Mekong Exchange Year, hosted by the Embassy of Japan.
The two young musicians – already veterans of the international music scene – launched into a rendition of Tsugaru Jonkara Bushi, a song native to Aomori Prefecture, and accompanied by the traditional three-stringed Tsugaru syamisen. This is a winter-warmer of a song, at once defying and celebrating the harsh northern climate of its birthplace and the spirit of the people who live there, and they sang it with a vigour and a pride that roused an attentive audience to cheers.
Anmitsu then continued with Akita Ondo, a song from another snowy corner of Honshu’s north-west coast. Their third song, Krungthep, is an original composition by Anmitsu, composed in Asia during a world tour. The Thai word, meaning City of the Angels, is another word for Bangkok and was inspired, they said, by the shining eyes of Thai children.
Kumi Kindaichi and Yuka Annaka take seriously their role as guardians of Japan’s musical traditions, and its interpreters for foreign audiences.
“We learned the Tsugaru syamisen and native songs from childhood and have always been very keen to preserve our own traditions. Even today the dynamic and soulful sound of the Tsugaru syamisen fascinates many people in Japan, particularly among the older generation. But even young people are vaguely aware of this instrument and its sound,” the two told The Myanmar Times after the event.
The Japanese duo were followed on stage by Myanmar harpist U Hlaing Win Maung, whose playing brought to mind the sound of streams rippling through leafy valleys and the song of birds. The peaceful atmosphere created by U Hlaing Win Maung’s three songs created a pleasing contrast with the faster and more driven sound of the Tsugaru syamisen.
“The sound of the Myanmar harp is melodious and soulful. Though this is the first time we’ve seen it live, we’ve heard CD recordings by U Hlaing Win Maung. It’s so mellow,” said Yuka Annaka.
“Whenever Japanese people, especially older people, hear the name ‘Myanmar’ they think of the Myanmar harp,” said Kumi.
In a musical departure from the earlier songs of the concert, Anmitsu returned to the stage to join U Hlaing Win Maung in a Japanese song, “Sakura” (cherry blossom).
“I did not find it difficult to play a Japanese song (“Sakura” is accompanied by the Myanmar harp), but the styles of Japanese and Myanmar music are different, so I had to adjust,” said U Hlaing Win Maung after the concert.
After “Sakura”, the Anmitsu duo took up the Tsugaru syamisen again to play a famous Japanese folk song, “Hana” (flower). As Yuka plucked the strings, Kumi sang the words in Myanmar, with a faint Japanese accent, as the audience hummed along before breaking into applause to show their appreciation of Anmitsu’s mastery of their musical craft, and their interpretation of their heritage.
The Tsugaru syamisen in is an important cultural artefact amid the long winters and heavy snowfalls of rugged Aomori. In the dark, cold nights, parties and festivals with music, singing and dancing were a source of great relief and comfort.
Yuka Annaka, prize winner at a number of Tsugaru syamisen competitions, and Kumi Kindaichi, also a folk singer, formed Anmitsu in 1999. Since that time, the group has performed more than 50 times a year, holding concerts and live performances and playing at educational institutions.
Their first overseas performance was at a concert in Myanmar, the Japan festival at Yangon National Theatre. In 2002, the duo performed at a concert in London entitled “The Power, Spirit and Beauty of Japanese music”. They have also performed at a reception welcoming the president of Indonesia hosted by the then Japanese prime minister Koizumi.

Obama in Myanmar: How Ozomatli's 2009 visit served as a barometer

Obama in Myanmar: How Ozomatli's 2009 visit served as a barometer
By Randall Roberts
Los Angeles Times Pop Music Critic

November 19, 2012, 3:06 p.m.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-obama-burma-myanmar-ozomatli-2009-visit-20121119,0,3486153.story
With President Obama’s visit to Myanmar on Monday, a long-secluded country has earned a rare moment on the world’s stage. Tucked between Thailand and Bangladesh in Southeast Asia, the country also known as Burma has been ruled by a military junta for five decades, but over the last year has gradually begun the process of transforming itself into a more free and open society.
It’s a world away from 2009, when Los Angeles band Ozomatli became the first American musicians to officially perform there in decades. Touring as cultural ambassadors for the U.S. State Department, the band played two concerts and took part in a number of outreach programs in the country’s biggest city, Yangon. As Ozomatli's manager Amy Blackman recently wrote to fans, "We have been to some hairy places, but Burma was next level hair."

I traveled to Myanmar with the band for that tour, and witnessed firsthand the often bizarre traditions that had risen from the junta’s dictates, as well as the level of fear and distrust among the populace. Even three years ago, the name of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's most prominent and beloved spokeswoman, was forbidden from being spoken aloud.
(While we were there, she was still under house arrest, as she had been for much of the previous 20 years. She was released in 2010, and, in a profound political shift that few imagined even a year earlier, was elected to the country’s Parliament in April of this year.)
As the band was shuttled to and from performances at schools for the blind and deaf in the slums of the city, a State Department official stressed that a web of informants and undercover officers would likely have eyes on Ozomatli's members. Any online communications would also likely be monitored, and band members were strongly urged to show restraint when speaking to the crowds during two public performances. The consequences, the official explained, would be suffered not by the band but by the Burmese crowd, whose members could be charged with attending an illegal political rally.
Ozomatli had been working with the State Department on these sorts of tours since 2007, having signed on to travel to places where American music is seldom experienced live. Before its tour of Thailand, Vietnam and Burma, Ozomatli had performed at outreaches in locations such as Palestinian refugee camps, rural India and Madagascar.
This was the band's first tour of Southeast Asia, however, and from the moment we landed in Yangon, the surrealist nature of the restrictions continued. American money was accepted only if it were perfectly clean. Creased, dirty or otherwise used bills were rejected by merchants who couldn’t risk taking money that would be declined by the banks.
The musical highlights were profound and offered evidence of a spirit unsilenced by years of censorship. Burmese songwriters were required to get all songs approved by the government’s “Scrutiny Board,” which looked for language of dissent, and musicians who played cover songs had to get their set lists approved. Still, the sounds endured.
A prominent boulevard wall had been graffitied with the declaration, “punk’s not dead.” One night, Ozo singer-guitarist Raul Pacheco checked out the city's nightlife and landed in a bar featuring, curiously, a Burmese country & western band.
When another local rock band called Blind Reality performed alongside Ozomatli at a school for the blind, they did a version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” that was loaded with subtext. Addressing the “calm before the storm,” a female vocalist sang lines that, in hindsight, suggest that maybe she had a bead on the future: “When it’s over so they say/It’ll rain a sunny day/I know, shining down like water.”
Recent progress in the country has been profound, but, as Suu Kyi stresses, the process of modernization is delicate, and the military can easily revert to its old ways. Though some political prisoners have been released, others remain jailed.
But the country is opening up. The State Department has lifted many travel restrictions and is easing into normalized relations with the country.
Regardless, when singer-songwriter Jason Mraz performs an outdoor concert in Yangon on Dec. 16 -- erroneously reported to be the first international artist to appear at an open-air concert in the country -- he’ll likely get a similar debriefing about political speech before he walks onstage.
And when he does, chances are Mraz will experience something similar to what Ozomatli did: an appreciative, warm populace eager to open its ears to the world.

Walking free with Jason Mraz (The Nation)

Walking free with Jason Mraz
Onravee Tangmeesang
Special to The Nation
Yangon December 22, 2012 1:00 am 

American musician Jason Mraz was visibly moved as he took the stage last Sunday in Yangon, greeting the crowds as the first international artist to perform in an open-air concert in Myanmar and opening a new chapter in the country's music scene. He also mixed music with anti-trafficking messages, encouraging both locals and musicians to take a stand on human right issues.

More than 50,000 fans, both local and foreign, packed into People's Square and Park located on the west side of Myanmar's magnificent landmark, the Shwedagon Pagoda.

Most were young and like their peers elsewhere in the world, dressed casually in jeans. The women wore make up and the guys sported fashionable hair cuts.

The concert was organised by MTV Exit ((End Exploitation and Trafficking) in cooperation with US and Australian government aid agencies and the anti-slavery organisation Walk Free.

"I had a direct experience working with survivors of human trafficking in Ghana. There was no way I couldn't be part of this," Mraz said at the press conference before the show.

Walk Free used Saturday's concert to launch a campaign calling on major corporations to make a "zero-tolerance-for-slavery pledge" by the end of March.

For many of the Myanmar people, participating in this groundbreaking concert was their first experience of attending a show by a world-class songwriter and singer, especially one from America, as Myanmar was under US sanctions for decades. Most were too young to have attended the performances at small and select venues by jazz artists Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Charlie Byrd, all of whom visited the country under US government sponsorship in the 1970s.

"When I heard that 'MTV Exit Live in Myanmar' was bringing in an international artist to come and perform in our country, I was like 'Okay, this is a joke!' It was that hard to believe," said Su Larb Yadanar, who won a gift bag.

Mraz performed many of his best known songs but the highlights were almost certainly "Lucky", on which he duetted with local singer "Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein" and the finale, the smash hit "I'm Yours".

Even though the majority of the crowd couldn't sing along, they thoroughly enjoyed the concert and shouted his name long after he left the stage. Thai rocker Slot Machine also had them up and dancing, proving that language really doesn't matter when the music is good.

Local artists too used the concert to speak out about trafficking and slavery, issues that affect all parts of Myanmar.

R Zarni, one of Myanmar's popular singers, launched a song and a short documentary about human trafficking called "Traps of Life" at the show.

Phyu Phyu Kyaw Thein added she had met with several human trafficking survivors and would love to have the opportunity to sing a song about human trafficking.

Between sets, the organisers showed videos and gave presentations on how human trafficking can be prevented and a hotline number to call to report cases.

Student Yae Yint Ko Ko, 19, said the concert had driven the message home.

"I had no idea of the scale of the problem until I saw the videos [about human trafficking] at the concert. I feel sympathy for the victims. I will warn my friends and family about human trafficking. I definitely feel motivated from Sunday's concert," he said, adding that he hoped more international artists would perform in Myanmar.

But while the country is gradually opening up, several restrictions remain in place, with Mraz having to submit a list of the songs he planned to perform to government well in advance of the show.

Moreover, the country has no proper venue that would work for an international-scale concert.

Three weeks before the MTV Exit gig, several local indie rock/punk bands put together an underground concert in a Yangon park for some 200 fans. Among those playing was Side Effect, the first underground Myanmar band to perform in Europe. Side Effect had been invited to play in Hamburg, Berlin and Gera, Germany and their lead singer, Darko C, reports they were treated as "rock stars."

The last time The Nation talked to Side Effect in June, they hoped to have a proper stage concert in their home country as well as get to perform abroad. At least, one of those dreams come true.

Now that Mraz has performed in Myanmar, perhaps the spotlight will now shine on the country's own music scene.

"It would be great to see our people enjoying the same music that Berliners enjoyed," Darko says.