A Drummer

One afternoon in the late autumn of 2004, at the Trafelgar Square in London, after the speech of Nelson Mandela, there was a special stage for this African drum team. It was uncomfortably chilly under the typical charcoal gray London sky. Dressed all in white and milky green stripes, this overly bright-coloured group of the black was like a drollery for London. It was one happy sound of a feast spread all over the gray sublime Trafelgar. The whole air of the congregation was rather the 'emblem of the gloomy awakening of misery'; to 'make poverty history', when they, the milky green drummers were playing the pure joy of life. Who had said that life is agony, why do you choose to cry when we are able to choose to sing, said a joyous frog to me. There, I heard the sound of morning dew sprinkled on the sound land. It smelled like the breeze traveld all the way from the forest of truth to the Trafelgar square. Life was all vibrating with all that human rhythm.

12:00am 14 Nov 2006 at Chunyun Jazz Club, in Hyehwa, Seoul

A sketch of Jonathan Pollard the Drummer,
drawn by Angel Hye-young Kim