Hands Across The Water

The Story So Far...

Andrea Zonn and John Cutliffe

It was December 28th 2004 and I was watching the horrific news which had been coming out of Southeast Asia for the last two days. While I was watching, my good pal Andrea Zonn called from Nashville called to wish us a belated Merry Christmas. Somewhere in the conversation we decided that between us we knew some pretty good musicians and we were sure they wouldn't mind helping out if we were to set something up to ease the suffering caused by the Tsunami.

Of course it was one of those things that neither of us thought would really happen although we really wanted it to. So I wrote a quick email to Garry West the owner of Compass Records who I had met a few times in the past and who Andrea plays with as part of the Alison Brown band. Within an hour Garry, who was on vacation, replied to my mail and weighed in with 100% support for the idea.
Now of course the idea had become a reality and there was work to be done.

Some four months later we have spent thousands of hours on the project, some weeks working 15 or 16 hours a day in and out of the studio trying to put the pieces together. In the process we have used more than 100 musicians, 29 different studio engineers and 27 different studios from Nashville to Sydney Australia and all points in between. I myself have driven more than more than 6000 miles and we can't even begin to count the thousands of emails and hours of phone calls that have kept lines buzzing worldwide. We have uploaded and downloaded gigabytes of session tracks and mixes.

Now we have 16 tracks of beautiful music from some of our favorite people, working together to help children they don't even know in countries thousands of miles away.