Jazz’s Agenda as Protest Music in ‘Brassroots Democracy’

A Nazi march in Columbus, Ohio. Flyers plastered in Northwest Indiana from the local chapter of the KKK. A policy mandate to infuse Christian nationalism into the federal government. These are not the headlines of old, but national news from November 2024. As we brace for the onslaught of the second Donald Trump administration, we are reminded of more troubling moments in American history when white nationalism was the accepted order of the day and dominated all aspects of political and social life. From that horrific savagery came a movement that created a musical language for capturing resistance.

That music is jazz, and its story frames Benjamin Barson’s outstanding book, Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons. Drawing together the movement of people through capitalist, religious, and social networks of the Americas, Barson has written a phenomenal historical work from his vantage point as a scholar and musician. It would be limiting to say that he simply understands the material; he writes in a way that shows how jazz, swing, and brass bands manipulated emotions and hearts to capture everything from the sound of plantation slavery to sex trafficking. These innovators allowed “their sonic stories [to] alchemize; sound becomes heartbeat becomes pain becomes release, becomes resistance. Each motion converges in the rhythm of breath – the inhale, the exhale – each precious, each endowed with the divine right to breathe freely.”

A dissertation-like, richly-researched quality permeates Brassroots Democracy, which should find a home in graduate seminars on history, ethnomusicology, geography, and critical race studies. Barson’s audience is academic, and it is obvious that his students at Bucknell University are lucky to have a professor of this literary caliber.

Richly researched, this volume is written in a non-chronological style on purpose. According to Barsons, “Acknowledging the nonlinear and fragmented history of plantation modernity’s sacrifice zones, 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.” Translation: history is messy, and this book seeks to find what Frou Frou once called “beauty in the breakdown”.

Each chapter focuses on a key aspect of jazz’s development by focusing on music pieces, key contributors, and the lived geography that also made the music. Readers will learn about artists like Daniel Desdunes, Lorenzo and Luis Tio, Alice Zeno, Mamie Desdunes, and so many others and absorb a deep appreciation for their roles in developing many musical genres that we now squabble over. Readers will learn much from Brassroots Democracy about Haiti, jazz history, and New Orleans. This book details the beautiful and bleak ways that jazz music created the soundtrack of an emancipatory movement that lasts to this day.

Barson shows that terminology can be limiting and limitless. His writing made me realize that it takes academic ventures like his to break down what we think we know about certain topics and push back against binaries. I knew that there was some Mexican influence on jazz, but Brassroots Democracy showed me that it is too limiting to think of Mexican musicians in New Orleans or Black people in Mexico; rather, Barson calls this frontera sónica – “an aural repertoire of Black, Indigenous, and Mexican convergence spaces” with “their strikingly polycultural musical forms … pointing to new words of possibility and alternative social relations grounded in subaltern solidarity.”

Each chapter in Brassroots Democracy could stand alone as a mini missive on key features of the history of jazz, but the material on prostitution was the most riveting and sickening. Barson describes the role of Storyville, the infamous neighborhood of brothels in New Orleans, and its role in the history of music. While the area is now a tourist destination with an exhibit on “The Sex Workers of Storyville” at the Historic New Orleans Collection museum, Barson delves into the horrors of the time and does not romanticize in the slightest how sex trafficking and prostitution normalized the history of sexual violence dating from slavery. “Black families were destroyed so that white families could transmit intergenerational wealth,” he writes. Accordingly,

“the sexual pleasure of whites had long been a fulcrum by which Southern capital in enslaved people expanded … White enslavers’ experiences of pleasure were produced through the erotic annihilation of Black bodies. Many prominent plantation owners, including Thomas Jefferson, held sex slaves as property. Storyville reproduced this locus of plantation pleasure by creating a prostitution market that catered to antebellum fantasies of mixed-race sexual slaves.”

Barson has also provided a great deal of commentary on how black bodies were sacrificed to the white gods of capitalism through sex and labor. He quotes Édouard Glissant, who wrote that Black people’s music was “Negro spirituals and blues … jazz, biguines, and calypsos … salsas and reggaes … This was the cry of the Plantation, transfigured into the speech of the world.” The music, the stomp, the hymns, and the blues that came from plantation agriculture, particularly cotton and sugar, came from a maniacal desire to destroy good land to grow crops … and the black people growing those crops. Planters simply did not care about what the brutality of this work did to the workers; it was genocide. Barson calls this arrangement plantocracy and suggests even at the beginning of Brassroots Democracy that the “extrajudicial executions of Black Americans, like those of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, starkly reveal that the specter of plantation hierarchy still orders American society.”

Brassroots Democracy inspires hope about what is possible under the bleakest conditions. If a music built on solidarity with multicultural roots was a vehicle for change, could it not happen again? Could another “Afro-Indigenous alliance” as “vibrant cradles of cultural creation” create a new music (and therefore a new politics) to support the needs of those New Americans who may be marginalized, targeted, and possibly denaturalized in the next Trump administration? As Juliana Spahr once wrote, “Sometimes it feels like it is over and it’s not. Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it’s over.” Our work has just begun. It is far from over.