The coolest rock band on the planet? Don’t ask me. I am to trends in popular music what Wayne Rooney is to molecular biology. But I know what the coldest band of the planet is — or soon will be. Four technicians from the British Antarctic Survey have formed a musical combo called the Antarctic Minkes. And next Sunday they will take their guitars out into the seriously nippy gales of the South Polar winter and perform a brisk but heroic busk on the ice. Without gloves, naturally. You can’t play a mean, moody riff in woolly mitts.

I just hope that passing penguins realise how lucky they are, and give generously. Because these four intrepid lunatics aren’t strumming alfresco just to acquire an arty strain of frostbite. They are part of one of the year’s most unusual musical events. It’s the World Busk, which happens next Sunday at noon (local time) across the globe — on all seven continents, in fact, thanks to the Antarctic Minkes.

And not just on terra firma. Out in the Baltic Sea one of our mightiest warships, HMS Illustrious, indomitable veteran of the Falklands, will give 800 sailors a brief respite from Nato exercises to take part in the World Busk. They will be part of a project that also encompasses a Gypsy band in Japan, a punk outfit in New York, 17 harpists in Pennsylvania, folk singers in the Falklands, jazz in Rio, barbershop in New Zealand, a brass band in Kampala — and hundreds of musicians across the UK.

The whole thing stems from one man. I met David Juritz 22 years ago, on an orchestral tour. I warmed to him the moment he produced his South African passport at Heathrow and cried, “Don’t let me through! I’m a pariah!”. I soon found out that he was a top-class violinist, good enough to lead London orchestras. But I had no idea how deep his charitable and humanitarian instincts ran, nor his streak of barmy eccentricity, until a couple of years ago, when — feeling “a mid-life crisis coming on” — he embarked on one of the craziest tours that any musician has ever undertaken. Accompanied only by his fiddle and (embedded in his memory) the solo violin works of J. S. Bach, he busked his way round the world — 24 countries, 50 cities — paying for his travel, bed and board (usually in grisly hostels) entirely from coins tossed into his violin case. He started from his local Tube station, Turnham Green, and was back four months later. And along the way he also raised £35,000 for his charity.

The stunt won him headlines. But it’s the charity, Musequality, that’s surely his chief contribution to civilisation. Many people, me included, believe that teaching kids to play, sing and appreciate music can have invaluable social and educational benefits, particularly in areas of high deprivation and among children who are vulnerable or have no self-belief. The huge success of the El Sistema project in Venezuela attests to that. But few people throw themselves as selflessly as Juritz has done into bringing music education to troubled regions. He believes that music can offer an “alternative philosophy of leadership through responsibility and sharing” in places where “power is all too often achieved through coercion and exploitation”. So he set up Musequality to bring music teachers and instruments to such communities. So far, it has funded projects in five areas: two in Juritz’s native South Africa, two with Ugandan children displaced by war or orphaned by Aids, and one in Thailand. There’s a plan for another in Goa. It’s to raise funds for all this that Juritz devised the World Busk.

At a time when TV, radio and the papers are giving us little to grin about — unless your idea of a laugh is the spectacle of Britain run by 630 headless chickens — Juritz’s mad but noble campaign brings a large smile to my face, at least. In Britain, after years of pushing music to the margins of school life, ministers and educational authorities are at last starting to agree with what enlightened scientists and sociologists have argued for years: that music improves children’s learning in many other subjects, that performing in choirs or instrumental groups increases their sense of self-esteem and social responsibility, and that music draws them into positive, safe, happy communities, rather than gangs. And if that’s the case here, in our comparatively calm country, it applies even more in those regions of the world where kids are traumatised by violence or desolated by poverty. Yet those are precisely the regions without the resources for music education. It’s to address that sad imbalance that musicians on the seven continents will be busking simultaneously this Sunday.

I declare a personal interest. Three years ago I met an inspirational young African called Nimrod Moloto. The product of a tough Soweto childhood, he had found redemption and fulfilment through music, and now ran something called the Melodi Music Project, a network of wind bands for similarly impoverished kids from the townships. He told me that he had hundreds of pupils desperate to learn music, but nothing like enough instruments to go round. I passed that plea on to you, the readers of The Times. The result? Dozens of cast-off clarinets, old bassoons and redundant french horns were liberated from attics all over Britain and sent to Soweto. Well, in Jo’burg on Sunday that same band, the Melodi Music Project, will be tootling The Times’s instruments as part of David Juritz’s World Busk. How wonderful that those whose lives have already been enriched should now be busking for funds to bring the same joy to others.

I had considered dusting off my own weapon of mass destruction this Sunday — the trombone — and pressing it to my saggy old embouchure for the first time in several years. All in a good cause, after all. But friends have persuaded me that I might have the opposite effect to the one intended: sending passers-by dashing for cover, rather than beguiling them into parting with folding money.

So instead I’ll content myself with doing what I hope you’ll do — making a donation to Juritz’s magnificent crusade (www.musequality.org). But my heart will be with those frozen-fingered guitarists in the sub-zero temperatures of the South Pole. Incidentally, if their gig goes well I hope they go on to launch a regular music club down there — not least because I’ve just thought of the perfect name for it. Ronnie Scott’s of the Antarctic.

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