In the past year the world has seen a lot of virtual events, ranging often from forgettable to passable. On a few rare occasions, though, a virtual event has made the participants and organizers say, “Wow, let’s do this again.”

That was the case with Verde Valley School’s revival of Jackson Browne’s Native American Scholarship Fund concert, held in an online, pre-recorded format last October.

When the dust settled after the online concert, dubbed the Dream Concert, 33,000 “attendees” had tuned in and the school raised $35,000 in tuition for American Indian students to attend the private boarding school.

Organizers hope to repeat the online concert in 2021, and there are murmurs of reviving Browne’s legendary in-person concerts — though that remains a remote possibility.

The wizard behind the virtual concert was Bill Carter, a filmmaker and author who teaches at Northern Arizona University and lives at Verde Valley School with his wife Leigh, who is the school’s anthropology teacher and Native programs coordinator.

The story of 2020’s Dream Concert goes back to 1990, when close friends of Browne in the Hopi and Navajo Nations inspired the famous singer-songwriter to hold a benefit concert to raise tuition for American Indian students, giving them greater access to the Verde Valley School in the Village of Oak Creek.

What followed is almost hard to believe if you weren’t there: An annual October concert at the school for the next decade featuring Browne and close musician friends, such as Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Bonnie Rait, Emmylou Harris and many others.

“These were huge concerts, here, right at this campus,” Carter said. “They’d have 6,000, 7,000 people out here, which is insane.”

For reasons not totally clear, the concerts stopped after 12 years.

“We did it there as long as we were welcome. But that’s a whole ’nother story. I don’t know if everybody was happy about us descending on Sedona for these concerts. We certainly were,” Browne said before playing the 2020 fundraiser’s opening song.

While just a memory now, the Jackson Browne concerts left a legacy in the region and the music community at-large.

“Everybody asked about the concerts. It’s like the No. 1 thing people ask to talk about with the school. ‘Where’d those concerts go?’” Carter said.

Carter had initially proposed to the school a more modest concert fundraiser — not necessarily a revival of the Jackson Browne concerts. After collaborating with U2’s Bono on a documentary about Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in 1995, Carter went on to work with many other musicians and had experience organizing small “boutique concerts” in Bisbee, where he previously lived.

Eventually, though, Carter and the other organizers decided to aim higher.

“The idea of starting the Jackson Browne concert to me was daunting. Like, what? It just seemed kind of overwhelming to be quite honest with you, because if you’re going to reach out to bigger musicians, it’s going to be harder to schedule them, and you really have to include Jackson in this, because these are the Jackson Browne concerts. So I just said, ‘let’s do it,’” Carter said.

As it so often does, fortune favored the bold.

In three months, Carter and his co-producers Leigh Carter and Jeneda Benally managed to secure a star-studded lineup of musicians for the fundraiser, including Browne, Michael Franti, Calexico, Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers and C.J. Ramone of the Ramones. As the producers added artists to the lineup, Carter said, the scope of the concert evolved.

Co-producer Benally, the lead singer of the band Sihasin — and also the first student to attend Verde Valley School on Browne’s Native American Scholarship Fund — was crucial in recruiting Browne for the Dream Concert, and his participation was a pivotal moment.

Carter said he spent hundreds of hours talking to managers and musicians, and color correcting and sound engineering the film, including a goosebump-inducing group singalong at the end of the concert featuring Browne singing “Take It Easy” outside Winslow – the song about standin’ on a corner he co-wrote with the Eagles’ Glenn Frey — along with other performers from the concert.

“In the old times [of the Jackson Browne concert], they always did that last song where everyone comes on stage and sings the same song. So, Jackson’s like, ‘we should do that again,’ and Jeneda just said, ‘yeah, we should do that.’ I’m like. ‘oh my gosh, that’s going to be a nightmare.”

But the song came together well, and he said there are plans to release it as a single to raise additional funds.

Carter said that Browne was excited that the concert included both classic artists and younger artists — a development from the original shows.

“We kind of did a cool thing — it was linking some people from the past [concerts], and then some new artists that had never played here.”

Carter said that the cancellation of so many concert tours in 2020 didn’t hurt his efforts to recruit musicians in a short period of time.

“You’re not going to get the Lumineers and Michael Fontis on the same date” in a normal year, he said. For his efforts on the project, Carter received a nomination for the Governor’s Arts Award, organized by Arizona Citizens for the Arts. Though he found out last week that he’s not one of the three finalists for the award, which will be presented Friday, March 26, he’s “takin’ it easy.”

“Right now I’m trying to recover and teach my way through this semester and think about [future concerts] a little bit later.”