From Ifeona Fulani’s conception of scattered yet interconnected and feminized ‘Archipelagos of Sound’ to Alejandro Madrid and Robin Moore’s study of the circulation of danzón throughout the Circum-Caribbean and Jason Borge’s analysis of the dissemination of jazz across Latin America, the mobility of music and musicians within the Caribbean has drawn increasing scholarly attention over the past several decades.Footnote ¹ Collectively, this body of research demonstrates, on the one hand, that racial identities are shaped by complex processes of cultural exchange driven, at once, by colonial and anti-colonial projects; and on the other hand, that racial identities have been central to the construction and performance of musical practices, and soundscapes across the Caribbean. From this perspective, it is clear that Caribbean sonic ecologies cannot be understood without considering the political economies, migration patterns, and collective struggles that originated them and continue to shape them. Within this growing field of inquiry, Benjamin Barson’s Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons offers an important and timely contribution that deepens and extends these conversations in original and surprising ways.

Barson situates his study within scholarship on the impact of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) on the formation of new collective and revolutionary identities in the Black Atlantic. In particular, he draws on Julius Scott’s argument that a ‘common wind’ was crucial for the circulation of knowledge among Afro-American peoples across the Atlantic World in response to shared struggles, thereby transmitting strategies of resistance and ideologies of emancipation.Footnote ² In this way, Barson’s work dialogues with the ‘Haitian Turn’, an epistemological gesture that has positioned the Haitian Revolution as a central theme in modern world history.Footnote ³ Rather than treating this Revolution as an isolated historical event, Barson reads it as a generative force that shaped political culture, migration, and sonic practice in Louisiana and the Circum-Caribbean well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Barson’s conceptual approach allows him to explore the sonic worlds and networks of solidarity shaped by the movement of music and musicians across the Black Caribbean. In doing so, he offers new insights that blur disciplinary boundaries and highlight emancipatory practices that challenge conventional narratives of jazz. Barson achieves this by moving beyond restrictive accounts regarding jazz’s origins. The result is a well-crafted longue durée history from below that studies how war, revolution, plantation networks, and responses to white supremacy and industrial capitalism – shaped by complex and dynamic patterns of maroon and Black Creole migration – facilitated cultural and sonic exchanges between the southern United States and the Caribbean and fostered communities of solidarity among African Americans and Black Creole populations in New Orleans and the broader Caribbean.

This analysis, grounded in extensive archival research, offers new insights into the role of music in shaping collective identities and the social formation and organization of Black working-class communities in post-Civil War Louisiana and the broader Afro-Caribbean world. Central to this history is ‘brassroots’, the term Barson coins to describe community-led brass bands composed of Black musicians who collaborated with Black activists (20). Both historically grounded and theoretically generative, the concept of brassroots provides a structural framework for understanding how musical practice and political organizing became intertwined. By tracing the activities of these musicians and ensembles, Barson demonstrates how a community-based musical tradition emerged and contributed to the expansion of public and musical spheres, revealing the transformative potential of musicking, community formation, resistance, and Blackness. Such a collection of processes is what he conceptualizes as ‘brassroots democracy’ (21).

This provocative conceptualization of a series of specific musical practices invites readers to reframe the political dimensions of collective music-making, recognizing the brass band tradition as a political and cultural practice – in addition to its significance for jazz’s origins. To reconstruct this tradition, Barson examines a wide range of Black musicians and musical traditions, spanning from the Haitian Revolution to Afro-Louisianan militias and freed people during the Reconstruction era. The result is a multilayered historical narrative that traces the movements of Black communities and their music across Haiti, Mexico, and Louisiana. Throughout this trajectory, Barson juxtaposes documentary evidence from institutional archives with materials associated with what he describes as the ‘Black counterpublic’ (8), including songs, oral histories, and the organizational records of mutual aid societies. This plurality of sources constitutes one of the book’s key strengths, enabling Barson to make audible the voices and practices that conventional historical archives have often silenced or ignored.

Brassroots Democracy is divided into two sections, each comprising three chapters. The first half presents a series of microhistories centered on two ‘trans-Caribbean lineages’ (32), the Desdunes and Tios families. Through these case studies, Barson illuminates how music fostered networks of solidarity across multiple generations, creating the conditions for alliances among Creoles of color, Black communities in New Orleans, and the wider Black Caribbean. This section also has a biographical and microhistorical focus that provides intimacy and narrative texture, grounding the book’s larger theoretical arguments and inviting readers to see them as concrete processes and histories rather than abstract concepts.

In chapter 1, ‘The Common Wind’s Second Gale’, Barson introduces the Afro-Creole poet, cornetist, and violinist Daniel Desdunes to examine how musical performance and mutual aid institutions sustained Haitian–Louisianan political culture in the early Reconstruction era. By skillfully situating Desdunes within overlapping networks of artistic practice and civic organization, Barson presents music and solidarity networks as mutually reinforcing. Chapter 2, ‘Mamie Desdunes in Neoplantation’, shifts attention to Daniel’s sister, the singer and pianist Mamie Desdunes. Here, Barson argues that her work, which blended Haitian rhythmic traditions with storytelling conventions associated with the blues, illuminates how women musicians articulated and denounced the continuities of plantation economies and the exploitation of human labour by the logic of capital within New Orleans’ red-light district. This chapter makes a valuable contribution to the study of gender and music in the Black Atlantic, Southern United States, and the Caribbean, presenting women’s creative labour as a form of political critique whose place in jazz history warrants further consideration.

Barson then turns to the Tios family in chapter 3: ‘La Frontera Sónica’. Tracing the family’s migration from their settlement in Mexico in the 1850s to their return to New Orleans in 1877, he situates Black and Creole cultural exchanges beyond the binary framework of the United States and Haiti, extending his analysis onto a broader hemispheric geography. Through the Tios family’s history, Barson reveals how support from radical anti-slavery groups in Mexico for African-descended populations in the United States fostered dialogues among sonic cultures, transforming brassroots democracy into an international anti-colonial political project.

The second half of the book shifts from microhistory to a broader examination of the institutional and structural conditions that shaped brassroots democracy. Chapter 4, ‘Sowing Freedom’, focuses on the emergence of a new musical commons and its connections to gardening systems. It presents a suggestive analysis that connects the cultivation of land and the cultivation of collective sonic practices as strategies of autonomy, community building, and emancipation. Chapter 5, ‘Black Reconstruction and Brassroots Democracy’, explores how the development of brass bands and their participation in public musicking, particularly during political parades and voter mobilization campaigns, contributed to the formation of a new sonic politics within New Orleans’ public sphere during the Reconstruction era. Here, Barson offers some of his most compelling arguments about the relationship between musical performance, social organization, emancipatory practices, and political mobilization, showing how the physical presence of brass bands in public space constituted a form of democratic claim-making. Finally, in chapter 6, ‘Black Unions and the Blues’, Barson examines Black dockworkers’ unions to show how music became intertwined with the emerging syndicalist movement, fostering new forms of counterhegemonic culture and political organization that assigned music a central political role – a development he identifies as fundamental to the emergence of jazz.

Taken together, both sections demonstrate that the relationship between music and politics extends far beyond questions of aesthetics or metaphor. Rather than treating music merely as a symbolic expression of resistance, Brassroots Democracy shows how music and musicking acquired concrete material force through grassroots mobilization, the spreading of emancipatory strategies, and how they contributed to the formation of collective identities and Black solidarity networks, while opposing hegemonic structures and institutional forms of power. From this perspective, this book challenges conventional narratives that portray early jazz as politically detached, inviting readers instead to understand anti-Black violence and the celebration of a democratic maroon translocal identity as foundational to both jazz and broader forms of resistance. These forms of resistance, the book ultimately shows, were directed to a particular version of modernity that was being shaped between the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.

Some readers may find the contrast between the two halves of the book challenging. Whereas the first section unfolds through a series of interconnected case studies that illuminate the intricate dimensions of brassroots democracy as both a secondary Creolization and a sonic strategy of civil resistance and collective organization, the second section develops a more linear historical narrative that traces the transition from plantation economies to industrial capitalism. Yet this structural difference does not diminish the book’s overall contribution. On the contrary, the clarity of Barson’s prose, the richness of his examples, and the conceptual precision of his structural analysis provide important new insights into the relationships among music, Black solidarity, grassroots activism, and anti-capitalist resistance in the Black Caribbean. Read as a whole, the book’s two-part architecture reflects the dual nature of its subject: the intimate, embodied experience of making music together, and the broader social and economic forces that both constrained and were contested by that practice.

Brassroots Democracy is a book that will appeal to scholars across multiple disciplines, including musicology, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, and sociology, as well as to readers interested in new approaches to jazz studies and the Black Caribbean. Its methodological innovations, theoretical ambition, and archival depth make it useful reading for anyone working at the intersection of music, race, and political history in the Atlantic world. The book’s broad scholarly impact is evident in the numerous honours it has received, including the 2025 Robert M. Stevenson Award from the American Musicological Society, the 2026 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and the 2025 Barry and Claire Brook Award.