After totaling more than half a million views, a video of Frenchman Patrick Mathis playing MJ’s Smooth Criminal on a barrel organ has gone viral in only several days.
Barrel organs (usually used by off-street performers to produce simple melodies) work by taking in sheet music that rotates around peg-studded cylinders; air flow blocks certain pipes to produce a sound used by organ-grinders, and heard on fairgrounds. Mathis arranged this version of MJ’s track himself, and the result is astonishing…