Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons

Benjamin Barson's brilliantly conceived, exhaustively researched, and persuasively argued Brassroots Democracy makes significant and lasting contributions to musicology, sociology, political science, social history, and cultural studies. The book shows how the seemingly apolitical festivity of Black brass bands in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Orleans helped establish what Barson calls the jazz commons—a “jubilant interculture” that mobilized solidarity and celebration in the service of opposition to the white apartheid plantation regime. Consistent with Stuart Hall's formulation that the best way to understand practices of expressive culture is to decipher their inner logics, interpretive schemas, structures of inference, and propositional premises, Barson explores how the jazz commons served many different functions. At different times and in different ways, the brass band was a performative ensemble, a mutual aid society, a repository of collective memory, a locus of moral instruction, and a cornerstone of an alternative and often oppositional public sphere. The broader jazz commons delineated in Brassroots Democracy offers evidence that aesthetic choices have social causes and consequences, that “playing” music is work but labor can be creative, that workers’ politics neither begin nor end on the shop floor, and that musical texts can draw their determinate shape and influence from their social and historical contexts.Barson ranges widely in his explorations of what might seem to be diffuse research objects: musical preparation and performance, racial domination and resistance, class and gender oppression, and migration and mobility. Yet all of these research objects cohere seamlessly around the consistent research questions that Barson asks about how and why music helped organize mass movements and produce a public culture rooted in collective struggles for self-defense, self-definition, and self-determination. Consistent with the best traditions of cultural studies, Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how seemingly small practices contain large meanings and how expressive culture serves as a site for negotiating who speaks and who is silenced, who is included and who is excluded, and how people make meaning for themselves under conditions they do not control.Barson's explorations into how the brass band came into being and continued to function as a complex social force uncovers hidden histories, alternative cognitive mappings, and occluded archives, imaginaries, epistemologies, and ontologies. Racist terror in the Louisiana countryside provoked migration to New Orleans where residential segregation and predatory policing imposed a linked fate on Black people from different backgrounds and with diverse class positions and cultures. Refugees and exiles from Haiti and Mexico enabled residents of New Orleans to see themselves as part of a global counterplantation mobilization while infusing local music, food, language, and labor solidarity with cosmopolitan qualities. One surprise follows another in chapters that delineate the importance of Black womanist resistance to racial capitalism in forging local vocabularies and grammars of opposition and that explicate how the existence of Mexico served as a locus of antislavery refuge for dissident New Orleans Black people. Barson shows how the rhythms, speech patterns, and voicings of Baptist and Pentecostal religious services contained musical forms, figures, and devices that permeated early jazz and how the irregular beats and surprising improvisations inside the jazz commons had affinities with community agroecological gardening practices that resisted monoculture in favor of crop rotations and interspersing fruit trees and ornamental trees. He argues persuasively that performances on the bandstand were part and parcel of a larger performative repertoire honed and refined in the marching of street parades and the forging of trade union organizing and class solidarity among longshore workers.The maroon ecologies and jazz commons at the heart of Barson's inquiry traverse borders and boundaries of all kinds. He shows how the Black working class recognized its connections to a wider world, producing an internationalism that made local music an amalgam of diverse forms of instrumentation, rhythm, and melody. Largely excluded from the formal institutions of political power and collectively oppressed by them, the Black working class in Louisiana expanded the spheres of debate, deliberation, and decision making beyond electoral politics through the creation of an active and engaged public sphere commons manifest in unions, social clubs, music ensembles, volunteer fire departments, farming and business cooperatives, and street parades. The parades proved especially important as mobile concerts that commanded collective participation in public space through rhythmic syncopation as a form of mutual recognition, respect, and cocreation. Brass bands helped raise funds to establish schools on plantations and became schools themselves in the city as sites of musical and social instruction and apprenticeship.In his analysis of the links between brass bands and abolition democracy, Barson draws on the knowledge and insight he has attained as a prize-winning saxophone player and composer. He notes that inside the jazz commons time was more of a relationship than a metric, that rhythmic synchronization was crafted collectively. Improvising patterns on up beats, after beats, and down beats conditioned players and listeners to expect surprises and respond to them, promoting new forms of social as well as musical articulation and movement. The political commons grew in relation to what Barson calls a socio-sonic commons that traversed time and space, blending swing and blues with cinquillo and danzón. Barson reveals how Mexican and Mexican-influenced players offered new inflections on the cornet and clarinet as but one example of a broader pattern of connection by which musicians differentially located historically and geographically found families of resemblance in their musical and social lives.The silos created in scholarly research by disciplinary divisions artificially disaggregate practices and processes that in actual social life are often aggregated, interactive, intersectional, and mutually constitutive. We benefit from the specialized focus of disciplinary knowledge in many ways, but at the same time the conventions of scholarship hide important associations, affiliations, connections, and convergences. The success of Brassroots Democracy stems in no small part from Barson's commitment to pick up the pieces and see how they fit together, to deploy the disciplines as tools for understanding different aspects of our shared social existence rather than viewing that existence as a site on which to project and perform disciplinary mastery. Scholars across the disciplines will learn much about their specialized fields from Barson's expert deployment of their concepts, methods, and theories, but this splendid book holds open the possibility for something more—for scholarship that understands the importance of learning from the profound wisdom and inexhaustible creativity of aggrieved communities in struggle.