Liberia - Letting Freedom Ring

The great jazz drummer, first bebop pioneer and master of all styles—Max Roach, an African American—studied the rich drumming cultures of Africa first hand, and summed up his learning in the phrase ‘Let freedom ring!’

The sticks of skilled, loose drummers, as extensions of the hands, run around the kit, on fire. They form patterns, rings and polyrhythms, with tom-tom rolls accented and punctuated by snare-drum snaps.

In music, there is nothing closer to surfing than drumming. But what if your drumheads are cruelly torn, your snares snapped in two, your cymbals bent, your bass pedal crushed—worse, your hands severed in torture? Africa has also been war-torn. After the colonial period and its terrible history of slavery and greed, when European countries withdrew from their African colonies, there was often not peaceful transition.

In some areas, old rivalries were renewed, and in others, new conflicts set ablaze. Often, the music stopped, the beat froze, and hollowness emerged, life was desperate—entirely about survival. Child soldiers were recruited and trained to fight in wars they did not understand, their parents already dead from the conflict. Between 1990 and 2004 many Liberians grew up knowing only terror, rape and hardship.