While jazz traces its roots to Louisiana, the story of the music’s evolution is typically told along the lines of a melding of European and African musical influences.
Congo Square and the bordellos of Storyville are frequently and superficially depicted as the places where jazz emerged; the Big Easy, writ large, is the city where a perceived ‘superior’ European classical music tradition (with its reliance on brass and stringed instrumentation and arrangements) becomes alloyed with the ‘native energy and rhythms’ of African musicians.
In less than 500 pages, however, Ben Barson compellingly retells the creation story of jazz, revealing a music which is inextricably bound up with the mass mobilisation of freed people during the Reconstruction era immediately following the end of the American Civil War.
Barson, a protégé of saxophonist Fred Ho, is a baritone saxophonist, recording artist and political activist, who received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, studying at the feet of the trailblazing jazz pianist and academic Geri Allen.
Currently an assistant professor at Bucknell University, Barson presents a thorough-going analysis of the ways in which the Haitian revolution became a powerful impetus for cultural and socio-political change in New Orleans, Louisiana, and an influence on the development of jazz.
Barson draws attention to the fact that Black musicians through their brass bands and musical performances were integral in resisting the oppressive forces of southern plantocracies, forming broad coalitions with local churches, trade unions and other civic groups and ultimately creating the basis of what he terms a ‘Brassroots Democracy’.
‘Maroon ecologies’ describe the communities and environments created by escaped enslaved Africans, known as Maroons, who fled plantations and settled in remote areas across the Americas. These communities were often located in generally inaccessible and inhospitable swamps, mountains and dense forests, providing natural defences against recapture, and where they could improvise a new, democratic political culture.
By the ‘Jazz Commons’ – and key to an understanding of the book – the author builds upon the important concept of the ‘Common Wind’ introduced by Julius Scott in his opus The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, regarding an informal channel of information shared among African diasporic communities working in ships and on docks and ports in the US and Caribbean islands around the time of the Haitian Revolution.
It should be remembered that Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave and astute military strategist, led a successful revolt in Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti) in 1791. Haiti went on to win its independence from France in 1803, establishing the first ever republic in the New World created by former slaves.
However, the immediate ensuing years of that nation’s independence were marked by serious economic challenges; thousands of Haitians, including former slaves and other free people of colour were forced to flee the new republic with 90 percent of the refugees ending up in New Orleans. Historians suggest that by 1810, nearly 10,000 migrants arrived in the Crescent City, drawn by the city’s linguistic and cultural affinities to their own creole culture.
Barson foregrounds the work of the Martiniquan scholar, Edouard Glissant, in his examination of creolisation in the historical context of Haitian and African-American societies in Louisiana.
However, given his consideration of the broader cultural influence of the Caribbean islands, Barson may have missed an opportunity to include the work of creolisation theorists such as the Barbadian poet/historian, Edward ‘Kamau’ Braithwaite.
Importantly, though, Barson underscores the gendered nature of music-making in New Orleans with his chapter on Mamie Desdunes in the Neo Plantation: Legacies of Black Feminism among Storyville’s Blues People. He refers to the music of Mamie Desdunes, the sister of multi-instrumentalist Daniel Desdunes, who was herself an accomplished singer and pianist combining Haitian rhythms and storytelling traditions with the Blues in the late 1800s. Her work denounced the patriarchal sex industry she toiled in – the Storyville Red Light district.
The chapter concerning Dockworker activism and New Orleans Jazz provides a penetrating study of the ways in which musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Willie Parker, Pops Foster and others, who spent a ‘significant part of their early lives loading and unloading cotton , tobacco, coal, and other commodities onto ships in the port of New Orleans’, helping the Big Easy to become one of the leading centres of capitalism in the American South. The chapter yields important insights into the role of New Orleans musicians and the Black Longshoremen’s Protective Union Benevolent Association in the early 20th Century.
Barson’s broad historical sweep encompasses the integration of ecological and artistic concerns and a critical analysis of the way enslavers, the enslaved and the recently freed used and abused land within the context of the plantation model – giving way to a limited commune movement in Louisiana. In the chapter titled, Sowing Freedom: Abolitionist Agroecology in Afro-Louisiana, Barson draws on the story of a music instructor who is paid in yams.
Barson’s La Frontera Sonica chapter and its account of the Tio family who relocate from Louisiana to Veracruz, Mexico, is helpful in understanding the story behind what Jelly Roll Morton referred to as the ‘Spanish Tinge’ in his music – the influence of the habanera and tresillo rhythms of the Cuban Contradanza.
Well illustrated with a generous amount of archival photos and sheet music, ‘Brassroots Democracy’ provides a deeply engaging and fine-grained analysis of the early beginnings of jazz, revealing a music birthed in the crucible of resistance, which in the end offers a triumphant contribution to global culture.
