The Liberation Music Collective
Rebel Portraiture
(Ad Astrum)

IN THE heart of Trump's cruel and buffoonish US, the troubadours of freedom are still making music, as evidenced by The Liberation Music Collective — two young scientists from Indiana who are also jazz musicians.

Bassist Hannah Fidler is a neuroscientist and trumpeter Matt Riggen a biologist and, in 2015, they gathered together a group of comrade musicians to give testimony to “a better, safer and freer world for us all,” using the messages and humanism of jazz.

They were present in Ferguson for the Black Lives Matter protests and played their music on the Women's March on Washington and at the demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline. They go where the people and their protests go, their instruments sounding out for rebellion and justice.

Their new album Rebel Portraiture celebrates the lives, sacrifices and heroism of today and throughout history in the US and the struggling world. It is a profoundly educative record, as well as one of powerful musicianship with stories stretches from Salem and Ohio to Honduras, Syria and South Africa, using the musical genres of African, Asian, European classical, Latin American and US traditions.

Its first narrative of resistance is based on the hymn Passing Away and dedicated to Giles Corey, who was crushed to death for refusing to plead guilty at the Salem witch trials in 1692. Ana Nelson's luminous soprano saxophone tells his story, accompanied by Fidler's earthen bass and Matt Waterman's expressive trombone. Riggen's crackling chorus adds edge to Corey's courage.

The deaths of the four students of Kent State University in Ohio, shot down by the National Guard in 1970 as they protested against the war in Vietnam, is marked in An Afterlife for Jeffrey Miller, which includes a poem written by one of the four and a note to his room-mate, followed by a movingly picked-out guitar solo by Kyle Schardt.

Fidler's bass introduces An Afterlife for Berta Caceres, a Honduran activist murdered for opposing the Agua Zarca Dam construction which threatened her people's water resources. Yael Litwin plays the gyil, a Ghanaian traditional stringed funeral instrument, while the French horn of Brennan Johns and Fidler's recorder add unusual orchestral voices.

In 2015, Syrian journalist Ruqia Hassan was killed by Isis and An Afterlife for Ruqia Hassan is dedicated to her and other Syrian and Iraqi journalists whose words led to their murders. Schardt's guitar artistry excels, playing tribute to journalists all over the world dedicated to the “investigation of abomination.

Two pieces remember the tenacity and resistance of South African LGBTQ campaigner Noxolo Nogwaza who was raped and murdered in 2011. Her body was abandoned by a roadside and Ditchside Monument and An Afterlife for Noxolo Nogwaza commemorate the aftermath of her death when 170,000 South Africans petitioned their government to provide protection for LGBTQ citizens but, as yet, there have been neither arrests nor convictions for Nogwaza's murder.

In a succession of moving solos, Riggen's horn weeps, while Miro Sobrer's trombone mourns yet is filled with hope. Sean Imbroden's tenor saxophone soars with pride for Nogwaza's courage and Fidler's bass solo provokes memories of the great bassist Charlie Haden's evocations of heroes such as Che and La Pasionaria on his Liberation Music Orchestra recordings. At the climax, the activist's struggle becomes a universal symbol.

This bold and often beautiful record needs to be broadcast and learned from everywhere. Its jazz testimony and human consciousness is absolutely in tune with our times.