Kansas City singer-songwriter Barclay Martin braved separatist violence and deadly snakes to make a documentary about putting on a concert in the Philippines

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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Often, Martin arrived in the morning at a potential venue and asked if he could perform that night. And it often worked. Even more surprising, he adds, was the number of strangers who welcomed him to stay overnight in their homes.

The generosity seems to have rubbed off on Martin. If accepting CFCA’s challenge wasn’t daunting enough, the city of Zamboanga also greeted Martin with the ever-present danger of violence.

Martin is careful to point out that guerrilla violence is not a daily occurrence in Zamboanga, but hospital sieges, kidnappings and mass beheadings related to a handful of separatist groups are common events. They’re facts of daily life that the people of the region live with, and something Martin lived with, too. In fact, the military convoy that escorted the film crew through the region was ambushed after the crew’s departure.

He describes his initial impression of the Philippines as a “dust-in-your-eyes, dirt-in-your-lungs” type of place, with a “Spanish flavor” and “frenetic inertia.” The project itself involved four trips to Zamboanga over the course of eight months, the last of which saw the completion of the concert.

But first, musical acts had to be rounded up.

Martin and crew visited families sponsored by CFCA as well as native tribes to recruit teenagers interested in performing at the concert. “Music is an integral part of Filipino culture,” Martin says. “It’s very much intertwined with their identity.”

Still, most of the young people he tried to recruit as potential musicians had never experienced live music — some even asked what a concert was.

Teenagers who showed interest attended intensive workshops, where they were taught how to play traditional Filipino music. Because of the risk of violence at an event as public as a concert, much of the formal planning had to be kept secret.

To secure a place for the concert to be held, the film crew visited and sang traditional songs to the city’s mayor, Celso Lobregat. Afterward, they asked the mayor for permission to stage the concert on an unused parcel of land outside the city.

With permission obtained, they then discovered that the land was infested with Filipino cobras. Martin watched in awe as 40 or so laborers tramped through dense brush in flip-flops, using machetes to clear space and vanquish the fatally poisonous snakes.

After months of preparation, it was time for the show. People from all over the region arrived by car, bus, bicycle — even by dump truck. Word had successfully been passed along to villages through social workers.

Headlining the show were the 13 teenagers Martin had helped recruit; a 30-piece dance group; and Joey Ayala, a famous Filipino musician. “He’s a Bob Dylan sort of character — one of the godfathers of Old World Music,” Martin says.

By the end, a massive crowd comprising the area’s poorest residents, of all faiths, had traveled to see the show.

In the second week of April, Martin traveled back to Zamboanga, again braving the risk of personal harm to complete the final segment of the documentary. The film is scheduled for release sometime in 2009. Before they wrap shooting, Martin and the rest of the film crew want to find out how the concert has affected the lives of the young people who participated.

He’ll be back to join the rest of the Barclay Martin Ensemble for a concert Saturday at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church that will benefit the Center for Religious Experience and Study and the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council. A preview of the film — titled Zamboanga: Poverty, War, Music — will be shown.

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As for the prospect of returning to Zamboanga, Martin feels a mixture of excitement and caution. He’s as passionate about the documentary project as ever, but the potential danger that awaits him flashes briefly as he shifts in his seat.

Martin struggles momentarily as he tries to come up with words to describe the concert’s success, to express the Filipino culture’s overwhelming love of music. Then he remembers something a young Filipino child once told him.

“Music is free,” he says.