For the first time, George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh is accessible via streaming services, with all earnings benefiting UNICEF.
The 1971 charity function was made possible by Harrison’s strong friendship with fellow musician Ravi Shankar. Madison Square Garden in New York hosted two concerts that drew an all-star lineup of legendary performers, including Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Jim Keltner, Klaus Voorman, Billy Preston, and Badfinger.
It was a response to a terrible compassionate emergency in Bangladesh, and as Shankar was naturally introduced to a Bengali family, it was a fiasco near his heart. Harrison felt a sense of urgency to effectively utilize his contact book by bringing the greatest stars of the music business together for a first-of-its-sort occasion, which would start a trend for future pledge drives, for example, Live Guide and Homestead Help.
Harrison and Shankar at first would have liked to raise $25,000 with the shows, yet ticket deals alone produced near $250,000. Moreover, through the triple-circle arrival of The Show for Bangladesh, it has wound up giving the altruistic association with a large number of dollars, that have been highly spent helping the lamentable.
Harrison once said to describe The Show for Bangladesh: “The performers were perfect. I mean they totally put down their own inner selves to play together and to accomplish something on the grounds that the entire energy of that show was that it was an option that could be greater than the part of us.”
In the mean time, Shankar once recalled the discussion between the pair that prompted the formation of the two Madison Square Nursery shows: “I was feeling extremely miserable, having perused this news, and I said, ‘George, this is what is happening, I realize it doesn’t concern you, I realize you couldn’t realistically recognize.’ Yet while I conversed with George he was profoundly moved… and he said, ‘OK, I think I’ll have the option to follow through with something.'”
In 1992, Harrison expressed that The Show for Bangladesh was an immediate outcome “of my relationship with Ravi”. He made sense of, “I said, ‘On the off chance that you maintain that I should be involved, I think I would do well to be truly involved,’ so I began selecting this large number of individuals.”
At the hour of the shows, Bangladesh was going through enormous political strife which is as yet the case today, however hardly any in the Western world knew about the contention. In any case, Harrison and Shankar raised large number of fundamental dollars, yet they likewise put the Bangladesh circumstance on the radar of the majority.
In 2005, Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, established the George Harrison Asset for UNICEF, and all returns from streams will be coordinated to the cause.
