. Their first project was instructing special education students in how to make music using drums and percussion instruments. Today, their vision includes teaching music to all ages and experience levels, and from 11 a.m. to noon on Friday, Drummers Without Borders will be at the City Heights/Weingart Library for an interactive performance.Diaz, 62, is director of the organization and lives in Little Italy.
We want to develop all kinds of programs in diverse areas, without limits or restrictions. Artistically, we want to create without limits; musically, we don’t want to be attached to a specific tradition, style, form, or school; educationally, we want to find new forms of teaching basic concepts of music to everybody; and socially, we want to have the ability to collaborate with communities of all social and cultural backgrounds.
Drums are the only musical instruments common to all cultures in the world, from the Inuit people in the Arctic to the Tuareg nomads in the Sahara Desert, from the Bora tribes in the Amazon jungle to the Maasai people in East Africa. Every human group has been, over centuries, using drums and percussion instruments as the primary tools to complement the use of voice and hands as the basic media to create music.