Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Having had the punny tenacity myself to name a monograph Critical Brass,¹ a book called Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons would inevitably pique my interest.Much more than a pun, Benjamin Barson's book is an innovative rewriting of the history of the brass band music that came out of New Orleans during the transition from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow South, which played a crucial role in the emergence of jazz.By theorizing relationships between music and politics in the broader regional context of the Caribbean, Barson intervenes on several conventional narratives, ultimately offering a powerful depiction of the agency of Black musicking during a period of entrenching segregation.Barson defines "brassroots" as pointing to the "connections between the grassroots" and "community-led brass bands," which emerged out of the diverse Black, Caribbean, and Latin American communities that converged in New Orleans (p.3)."Brassroots democracy" refers furthermore to the transformative potential of the musical practices of these communities that accompanied or even prefigured political transformation and made New Orleans a "crucible of radicalism" (p.3).Barson's insistence on this emergent musical-political culture as a site of resistance counters conventional narratives of jazz radicalism as beginning with civil rightsera jazz musicians who supposedly challenged their apolitical predecessors.He argues that brassroots democracy played a vital role in the formation of the activist organizations of the time, including Black unions, mutual aid societies, and anti-segregation activists.Unwittingly reflecting the thematic focus of this volume of the Journal of Festive Studies on joy as resistance, the author portrays this "new, jubilant interculture" as an expression of "synchronized joy that nurtured the roots of their community's collective militancy" (p. 6).In contrast to previous studies that have viewed the supposedly Eurocentric Afro-Creoles as culturally segregated from the Black migrants who came to New Orleans after emancipation, Barson stresses the various points of solidarity between these and other communities.His focus on Creole musicians points him to a musical and political history of jazz with a lineage not in the city's mythical Congo Square or the amorphous cultural "gumbo" of the city, but in Haiti and its Revolution (1791-1804), famously the best-known successful revolt of enslaved people in history.The revolution resulted in mass migration of French planters and their enslaved captives to New Orleans, turning the city into a much more important part of the regional plantation complex with a fortified Francophone/Creole culture.Aligning himself with "the 'Haitian turn' in Atlantic history and Black studies," he explores the musical and political traces of the Haitian Revolution in New Orleans (p.12).Though many authors have connected New Orleans to the Caribbean world through Jelly Roll Morton's famed claim of jazz's "Latin tinge," Barson goes much further, showing how New Orleans became a place of encounter and circulation for diverse musical
Source: Journal of Festive Studies
Author: Andrew Snyder
Institution: Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4416664587
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