This dissertation is both a comparative cultural history and a social history of early New Orleans jazz. While twentieth-century paradigms tend to examine jazz as a product of a self-contained African American culture or of African-European interaction, I argue that we would be better served understanding jazz's syncretism within the Afro-Atlantic social movements which contested slavery, colonization, and capitalism in the Caribbean basin. From the Haitian revolution to Radical Reconstruction, new musical forms were an important tool to communicate political developments abroad as well as to generate an aestheticized political consciousness that imagined, built, and martialed the collective will to defend a new commons. Part one explores intra-Caribbean influences on the music and political organizing of Louisiana's Black communities, particularly highlighting the impact of the Haitian Revolution. I explore the life of bandleader and freedom-rider Daniel Desdunes, and his influential sister, the Stroyville blues pioneer Mamie Desdunes, arguing that their Haitian identities and connection to counter-plantation legacies influenced the development of their practice of jazz as activism. I also trace the family of clarinetists Lorenzo and Louis Tio whose connections to revolutionary Mexico allowed them safe passage to build an agricultural commune in the mid-19th century to escape the racial oppression of antebellum New Orleans. Part two explores the prominence of brass bands within Black American social movements in the south, including during the Civil War, at dockworkers' union parades in New Orleans, and on plantations themselves. Tracing the bands' institutional history opens up new connections between the collectivist structures heard in early jazz and the practice of grassroots democracy and communal economics among African Americans in both rural and urban Louisiana. In tune with the counter-plantation, these forms of social organization were recreated and resurrected in the music, performing the world they struggled to see.

Brassroots Democracy recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation. Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how Black musicians infused participatory music practice with innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Late nineteenth-century Black brass bands and activists rehearsed these participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction. Termed "Brassroots Democracy," this fusion of political and musical spheres revolutionized both. Brassroots Democracy illuminates the Black Atlantic struggles that informed music-as-world-making from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution. The work theorizes the roots of the New Orleans brass band tradition in the social relations grown in maroon ecologies across the Americas. Their fruits contributed to the socio-sonic commons of the music we call jazz today.

Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

Reveals how the new technologies of mass culture--the phonograph, radio, and film--played a key role in accelerating the diffusion of jazz as a modernist art form across the nation's racial divide. Focuses on four cities--New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles--to show how each city produced a distinctive style of jazz.

A look at the history of jazz music, from its origins to the present time, including the musicians involved in creating that history.

In the long decade between the mid-1950s and the late ’60s, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and Charles Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive, its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz—and American—history. The story’s central figures are jazz musicians like Coltrane and Mingus, who rewrote the conventions governing improvisation and composition as they sought to infuse jazz with that gritty exuberance known as “soul.” Scott Saul describes how these and other jazz musicians of the period engaged in a complex cultural balancing act: utopian and skeptical, race-affirming and cosmopolitan, they tried to create an art that would make uplift into something forceful, undeniable in its conviction, and experimental in its search for new possibilities. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t considers these musicians and their allies as a cultural front of the Civil Rights movement, a constellation of artists and intellectuals whose ideas of freedom pushed against a Cold War consensus that stressed rational administration and collective security. Capturing the social resonance of the music’s marriage of discipline and play, the book conveys the artistic and historical significance of the jazz culture at the start, and the heart, of the Sixties.