In Brassroots Democracy, author Benjamin Barson presents a “music history from below”, embracing the Haitian revolution, post-civil war reconstruction and early jazz. The term “brassroots democracy” is a synthesis of grassroots activism and New Orleans’ historic brass-band tradition, and Barson argues that jazz arose from the mass mobilisation of freed people during reconstruction during the decades before 1900. He explores the political activity of musicians as they built communes, performed at civil-rights rallies and joined general strikes. Collective improvisation embodied the democratic ethos of black reconstruction, Barson argues, resulting in a fusion of political and musical revolution.
Barson is an historian and musicologist who’s also a composer and baritone saxophonist. A protégé of saxophonist Fred Ho, he received his PhD from Pittsburgh University, studying with the great and sadly departed Geri Allen. He currently teaches at Bucknell University. Among the luminaries singing his book’s praises is Thelonious Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley, who explains how Barson places jazz in the black radical tradition.
This is a deeply researched academic book, and it isn’t a light read. The notes at the end run from pp. 283-406, and the index ranges from Marcus Garvey to Karl Marx. “Brassroots democracy”, he writes, is “the practice of performative assembly that laid the foundation for the simultaneous and syncretic expansion of public and musical spheres”. The book’s topic-based, non-chronological style acknowledges “the nonlinear and fragmented history of plantation modernity’s sacrifice zones”, explaining that “Brassroots Democracy is necessarily dissonant in its organization – its structure seeking to replicate the inter-epistemic processes at play in the contingent improvisation under study.”
Despite such sentences, the book is generally readable – though I’m not sure what I think about this “dissonant” approach. One possible advantage is that it is easier to dip into the book, rather than read from start to finish; chapters tend to be self-contained.
For instance, the chapter on trades unionism, “Black Unions and the Blues”, begins with a discussion of dock labour and industrial action. Musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, George Lewis and Pops Foster worked in the New Orleans docks, loading and unloading cotton, tobacco and coal, thus helping the city become the financial centre of the American South. As Barson comments, “Dock work was both the site of improvised musical community and brutal experiences of exploitation.” Jelly Roll Morton commented that the worst-treated workers were the roustabouts, who “would carry on their backs all kinds of things… looked like a man couldn’t carry so much. Singing and moving to rhythm of songs as much as they could… They were just like in slavery.”
One of its notable features is the way the book expands the geographical origins of jazz. Barson focuses on the history of black and Afro-Creole musicians through the eras of emancipation, reconstruction and Jim Crow, against the historical backdrop of the American South as well as the Caribbean and Mexico – Veracruz in Mexico turns out to be a neglected site of jazz incubation. For Barson, the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) – the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas – was crucial to cultural and political change in New Orleans and Louisiana in general, and thus to the origins of jazz. The chapter on La Frontera Sonica – “an aural repertoire of Black, Indigenous, and Mexican convergence spaces” – follows the migration of the Tio family from Louisiana to Mexico. Here the author illuminates what Jelly Roll Morton called the “Spanish tinge” in jazz – the element of jazz’s matrix that’s derived from the habanera and tresillo rhythms of Cuban contradanza. Musical case-histories include Daniel Desdunes’ use of Haitian-Cuban rhythms such as the habanera, tresillo and cinquillo complex in his only surviving composition, Happy Feeling Rag (1912).
A particular influence on Barson is the work of historian Julius Scott, who, in his book The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents In The Age Of The Haitian Revolution, postulated a cultural exchange in the 19th century between Afro-American maroons who had escaped slavery, and urban free black communities. This “common wind”, whose medium was Afro-Atlantic song, involved revolutionary anti-colonial and counter-plantation movements from Haiti, Mexico and New Orleans. (“Commons” here seems to be a metaphorical extension of the idea of common land, of the kind that was abolished with enclosure.) Barson is also influenced by Marcus Rediker’s concept of “music history from below”.
For some reviewers, the book pioneers a new approach to jazz history, one that undermines the traditional opposition between African and European influences. Though the historical issues involved are above my pay-grade, I think that they may well be right, and so the book is a groundbreaking one. It offers a rich, absorbing and wide-ranging treatment of neglected issues at the interface of music and politics. There are plentiful archival photos and sheet music, and Brassroots Democracy is a beautiful artefact of the kind that American publishers still seem able to produce.
Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies And The Jazz Commons, by Benjamin Barson. Wesleyan University Press, 424pp, $40/$31.99 US (hb, e-book). 9780819501127
