Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. By Ingrid Monson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-19-512825-7 (hardcover). 416 pp. $35.00.

Reminiscing about his Freedom Now Suite, drummer-composer max roach confessed to Ingrid Monson that "we never could finish it" because the concept of freedom was itself so hard to grasp: "we don't really understand what it really is to be free. The last song we did, 'Freedom Day,' ended with a question mark" (p. 174). To which one might respond: if the late max roach, who created a brilliant body of music dramatizing the civil rights revolution, drew up short before the concept of freedom, perhaps there is something in the term itself that resists definition—some ambiguity that, rather than rendering "freedom" empty as a term, makes it magnetic as a promise.