Benjamin Barson’s 2024 monograph Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies in the Jazz Commons is a remarkably thorough, brilliantly conceived, and beautifully written contribution to contemporary jazz history literature. The appeal and scope of the arguments Barson presents extend to anyone interested in how the early history of Black music in America is intricately and inextricably tied to the experiences of oppression and social activism among communities of colour in the American South. While Barson initially frames his work as a study of Louisiana jazz history, the coverage is focused on precursors to jazz and Black American music that extend well beyond the confines of the Louisiana Territory throughout the long nineteenth century. The content also necessarily extends well beyond musical considerations, with a tremendous amount of historical, cultural, geopolitical, and social context explored so deeply that it becomes foregrounded in much of the narrative.

Barson explains many of these historical and cultural functions as metaphors he has created or adapted that present the relationship of Black music to social activism on the part of BIPOC Americans in the face of systemic oppression. He proposes the term brassroots, a musical variant of grassroots organizing that considers early Black American music history from below, to define precursors to jazz that involve ‘community-led brass bands, populated by plantation laborers, urban activists, and Union army veterans that became an expression of Black cultural and political power in the post-war years’ (p. 3). Brassroots, then, is a metaphor for the community organizing and political advocacy among Black communities in Louisiana, and specifically in New Orleans, with a clear priority on activist musical expression. Much of this activism is placed historically within the concept of the counter-plantation movement, in which enslaved populations of Louisiana and the greater Afro-Caribbean ‘rejected the monocrop agriculture and industrialised overwork’ inherent in the dominant capitalistic plantation system of the American South and colonised Caribbean (p. 12). The maroon ecologies referenced in the book’s title connect a network of environments inhabited by refugees throughout the African diaspora in the New World with the cultural and political praxes that inform the jazz commons, a culmination of the processes, forms of expression, and shared language and understanding that inform Black American music from the nineteenth century to today. In Barson’s own description, Brassroots Democracy ‘traces the Black Atlantic struggles that informed [the] practice of music-as-world-making, from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution, highlighting the modalities through which New Orleans brass bands expressed the venerable connection between celebration, abolition, and a sociosonic commons’ (p. 4).

Structurally, the book is largely comprised of diverse though interconnected case studies presenting how Black music in the Americas throughout the long nineteenth century and beyond can be seen as examples of musical activism through shared performance traditions. Barson leverages the metaphor of historian Julian Scott’s common wind as a ‘regional network of communication… which connected Afro-American communities across the Atlantic world to a shared knowledge of, and will to, struggle’ to connect these diverse case studies (p. 13). This common wind is responsible for the dissemination and perpetuation of a wide variety of activist music ranging from subversive songs of the enslaved to brass bands of the early twentieth century, ultimately informing the entire tradition of Black American music. The first case study is explored throughout the introduction and focuses on the musical influences in Louisiana brought through the music of refugees of the Haitian Revolution. Songs from Haiti were popular throughout Louisiana in the early nineteenth century among both refugees and enslaved plantation workers and shared stories of successful dissent and rebellion. The next two case studies look closely at the Haitian-descended Creole Desdunes family, who are representative of direct social activism blended with cultural expression through music. In the case of patriarch Rodolphe Desdunes and son Daniel Desdunes, their deep involvement in the Creole-identifying activist collective Comité de Citoyens ‘illustrates how multigenerational Haitian Louisianan folkways – the common wind – were mobilised through counter-plantation organizing and popular music to defy the state’s ability to order racial space’. (p. 37). Daniel Desdunes’s sister, Mamie, is explored in a separate case study that investigates how her composition ‘Mamie’s Blues’ from 1895 ‘can be heard as both the polyphonic expression of the Black New Orleans working class and a “betrayed origin” in the history of jazz and brassroots democracy’ (p. 82). Other case studies focus on music and political activism in what Barson has coined the frontera sónica of the Mexican borderlands with a focus on the consequential Tio family of New Orleans clarinetists, in the agroecology of the traditional sustenance gardens of enslaved populations and their descendants, in the ethos of Black Reconstruction in the post-bellum South, and in the relationship of early blues and its connection to the activism of oppressed dockworkers of colour in New Orleans and the consequent development of early jazz.

As beautifully creative as the writing and concepts presented herein are, there are some attributes of this book that may tend to challenge the reader at times. The language Barson employs throughout is significantly dense, and the casual reader may find the narrative hard to consistently track. While there is a primary focus on music and activism in Louisiana and New Orleans specifically, there are extended passages that focus on related ecologies in other southern states as well as Mexico and the greater Caribbean. The narrative also includes lengthy explications of social and political history in the Caribbean at large throughout the nineteenth century, which some readers may feel veers too far away from musical considerations, though the historic background presented is crucial to generating a nuanced understanding of the musical and cultural dynamics at play. Barson also, at times, tends to generalise aspects of the narrative that compromise the incredible depth and rigour of his research. Just one example is his use of the term Afro-Creole nearly exclusively. In doing so, Barson appears to omit the existence of non-African Creoles of colour from his vision of late nineteenth-century New Orleans, who were an important component of the Creole community. Countering these potential issues for readers, Barson does include specific and surprising connections to jazz history, such as in his coverage of how Mamie Desdunes was sought out by Jelly Roll Morton as one of his earliest and most influential piano teachers, and how her unpublished but widely played composition ‘Mamie’s Blues’ has recently been identified by musicologist Vic Hobson as the earliest twelve-bar jazz blues (Reference Hobson2011). Another prominent connection to the jazz commons Barson folds into his narrative is how Creole trombonist George Fihle credited the popular band led by Daniel Desdunes as being the first to ‘swing’ the music, centring the origin of a defining aspect of the jazz tradition within the domain of important musician-activists.

Benjamin Barson’s Brassroots Democracy presents a highly nuanced approach to understanding the dynamics of interactions between social and political activism and the development of jazz in the American South. The work is incredibly thorough and impeccably researched as over a hundred pages of combined notes and bibliography attest. This volume presents a new history of precursors of jazz told from below that is sure to be a critical inclusion in any detailed study of early jazz and its precursors.