Music heals the burn

There are street concerts and then there are street concerts where the audience is made up of children who’ve just lost their homes and still somehow manage to dance like their shoes are on fire — assuming, of course, they still have shoes.

Into this scene of soot, tents and defiant joy walked Manu Chao, the Franco-Spanish musical vagabond who looks like he wandered out of a documentary on traveling musicians and accidentally tripped into a humanitarian crisis.

It happened in Tejeros, a low-income neighborhood in Manila that went up in flames faster than my self-esteem on a date. Forty-five families watched their homes burn last Wednesday.

Four days later, they’re living in tents on a basketball court, which I suppose is better than living in the scorched remnants of a kitchen, but still — call it less than ideal.

Now, you’d think the last thing these people needed was a guy with a guitar. But in Manu Chao’s case, the guitar is the thing.

He strums, he sings and suddenly the kids are dancing, the parents are smiling and someone’s asking for “Bamba Bamba” like it’s a bar mitzvah.

One man, Wilson Campos, who lost everything, grinned as he told a reporter, “They even played my request!” It’s oddly life-affirming. The world burns, but someone out there still knows the chords to “Bamba Bamba.”

Manu wasn’t alone — his guitarist Matías Giliberto came along, too, proving that misery loves not just company, but harmonies.

They played on the very court that now doubles as a shelter, a place repainted just last December by a Spanish art collective, which, in retrospect, feels suspiciously prophetic, as if the universe was already prepping the venue for a mash-up of tragedy and ska-infused redemption.

It wasn’t a concert in the traditional sense. There were no tickets, no stage and absolutely no one in the crowd had ever heard of Manu Chao before that day.

But by the end of it, everyone was chanting, clapping and probably asking where they could download his songs — though I’m guessing very few had Wi-Fi.

The whole event was cooked up by the Instituto Cervantes and the Spanish Embassy, possibly during an unusually inspired coffee break.

Meanwhile, volunteers were still clearing debris from the fire that injured at least one person and vaporized years of collective effort and IKEA furniture.

In a city like Manila, where May is the unofficial “season of combustion” thanks to heat, dryness, and houses made out of things that should never be near an open flame, the miracle isn’t that someone like Manu showed up to sing; it’s that anyone still had the spirit to dance.