The Book Cooks
Excerpt from

Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons
Benjamin Barson
(Wesleyan University Press, Middletown)

 

BRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY’S BIRTH IN NEW ORLEANS

New Orleans and Black Louisiana prefigured a radical, democratic tradition that confronted plantation capitalism, white nationalism, and patriarchy in meaningful and sometimes breathtaking ways. New Orleans’s preeminence as a center for Black activism, a bellwether for civil rights legislation, and home of a powerful mixed-race union movement helped make it a Black musical mecca and the “birthplace” of jazz. Not surprisingly, these spheres orbited in shared harmony. Music was not only politics by other means; it was produced by the same historical circumstances and creative resistance that made Louisiana’s post–Civil War political environment so explosive.

The connection between music and politics was not merely aesthetic or metaphorical but concrete and material. Connections between the grassroots and what I call the brassroots – 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 postwar years – made New Orleans a crucible of radicalism. Even before the Fourteenth Amendment granted Black male suffrage in 1866, community-led bands accompanied Black activists and recently emancipated people at mass meetings in New Orleans that numbered in the thousands. In these spaces, Black candidates were nominated to run for office even though it was not yet possible; Black voters were registered to rolls even though they could not yet vote; communally harvested lands were protected, parceled, and negotiated without legal claim; and common pools of resources, managed through credit unions, were generated and shared.9 Whether at Economy Hall, the Mechanics’ Institute, or the parades in the streets of New Orleans, these spaces – alternatives to capitalism called the commons – effectively created a parallel state and civil society to the white apartheid regime still in power despite the abolition of slavery. These activists fulfilled an essential criterion for a successful revolutionary movement whose major task, as Eqbal Ahmad notes, is “not to outfight but to outadminister the government.”[i]

The connections were not incidental. In 1867, the Black-owned New Orleans Tribune described a truly “new and glorious era in our history” ushered in by a parade with some “fifteen thousand Chinese lanterns,” “banners and flags flying to the breeze,” and “drums, fifes, and brass bands [that] were heard from all sides.” These were political spaces as much as musical and celebratory ones, and slogans were borne, and born, on these streets: “Eight Hours a Day’s Work,” “No Contract System,” “Free Press,” “We Know Our Friends,” and “Free School Open for All” adorned banners.[ii] New forms of political speech reflected the broad, multiclass character of parishioners. Their sophisticated political lexicon, diverse geographic backgrounds, and revulsion to the postwar contract system – which reproduced slavery-like social relations on former plantations –  became expressed in a participatory public art form.[iii] This democratic revolution in Louisiana – what W. E. B. Du Bois named “Black Reconstruction,” emphasizing its leadership in the Black working class[iv] –  fused with a distinctive brass band performance culture, giving rise to a new aural space where activists could “rehearse identities, stances, and social relations not yet permissible in politics.”[v] I call this simultaneous and syncretic expansion of public and musical spheres brassroots democracy, and its utopian soundscape is the compass guiding this book’s journey. Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons traces the Black Atlantic struggles that informed this practice of music-as-world-making, from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution, highlighting the modalities by which New Orleans brass bands expressed the venerable connection between celebration, abolition, and a sociosonic commons. This unique jazz commons reverberated through what I delineate, echoing Justin Hosbey and J. T. Roane, as maroon ecologies – nurtured in the sanctuaries of swamps and forests, of mountains and at sea, “where the enslaved formed a fleeting Black commons, [and] whereby they used their unique knowledge of the landscapes and waterscapes to extend a fugitive and transient freedom.”[vi] These maroon ecologies, the improvised socialities of plantation refugees that fostered Afro- Indigenous alliance, were vibrant cradles of cultural creation, and not merely due to their elusive and multinational characteristics. Édouard Glissant reminds us how “historical marronage intensified over time to exert a creative marronage, whose numerous forms of expression began to form the basis for a continuity.” Glissant points beyond metaphor. An 1837 police report, uncovered by historian John Bardes, depicts a raid on a musical ceremony in the back swamps outside of New Orleans. Sixty-one enslaved and free Black people were arrested. Many instruments were confiscated – ”clarinets,” “trombones,” and “drums.”[vii] In brass band performance, the subaltern voices of the plantation Americas echoed a polyphonic reminder of unity, an arpeggiated chain of resistance and refusal. From Bechet’s allegory to Glissant’s theorization, from this arrest report to the 1867 parades: the jazz commons were not merely a product of maroon ecologies; they also nurtured and expanded them, even when the land practices that informed their rebel epistemologies were suppressed or destroyed.

Brassroots democracy thus opens a window into the breadth and depth of brass band improvisation as linked to this commoning practice. Although the thick, textured polyphony of New Orleans’s collective improvisation tradition did not cohere until the turn of the twentieth century, other improvisational traditions were documented during the Haitian Revolution, observed among Afro-Louisianan militias, and developed in relation to the needs of African American freedpeople in the postwar arena.[viii] In each of these contexts, impro-visation encouraged new generations to make anew the wisdom of old. According to Sidney Bechet, the culture of post– Civil War plantation migrants in New Orleans brought with them new songs transformed by abolition:

It was years they’d been singing that [“Go Down Moses”]. And suddenly there was a different way of singing it. You could feel a new way of happiness in the lines. All that waiting, all that time when that song was far-off music, suffering music; and all at once it was there, it had arrived. It was joy music now. It was Free Day Emancipation. And New Orleans just bust wide open. A real time was had. They heard the music, and the music told them about it. They heard that music from bands marching up and down the streets and they knew what music it. That music, it wasn’t spirituals or blues or ragtime, but everything all at once, each one putting something over on the other. Some of those people didn’t even know what Emancipation was; they just know there was a hell of a parade going on, a whole lot of laughing and singing, a whole lot of music being happier than the music had ever been before.[ix]

Bechet’s account relates more to an imaginary of the moment than a historical account, as the evolution of brass band improvisation unfolded over several decades. Nonetheless, Civil War diaries and newspapers corroborate that Black celebration was a powerful catalyst for the emergence of new intercultural expression, and music often accompanied the moment of jubilee and the Reconstruction organizing that followed.[x] In Alexandria, for instance, one conservative newspaper complained that “long before day light” whites were awoken by “the steady tramp of the dark column of the ‘Radical Republican Clubs’” whose Black activists, “the well-dressed, ragged, bare-footed all,” were united in “marching to the music of the ... promised land.”[xi]

Bechet, then, evocatively describes the way brass bands developed a new mode of musical production over the longue durée of Reconstruction into Jim Crow: proactively remixing liberatory lineages by performing “everything at once.” Brassroots Democracy will explore just what that “everything” entailed.[xii] Hybrid musical forms converged with rural Louisianan migrants, a long-established cadre of Creole of color activists with connections to Haiti, and a Black Civil War sonic culture. Brass bands eventually became the preferred vehicle for a new, jubilant interculture. New Orleans was home to deeply rooted patterns of Afro-Atlantic creolization, and this cultural elasticity proved useful to cohere the cross-class and multilingual social revolution that erupted in the city and its environs. Projecting an infectious optimism, brass bands facilitated a new imaginary wherein rural and urban freedpeople enacted and defended an emergent social order through organized displays of enthusiasm, solidarity, and social commentary. Afro-Louisianan cultural workers thus tapped into the creative celebration of the present in a manner both intersubjective and intercultural, with a militant fidelity to their space and moment.[xiii] They demonstrated that their answer to the Black suffering provoked by plantation slavery was a synchronized joy that nurtured the roots of their community’s collective militancy. This was, in the words of James H. Cone, a “unity music”: it united “the joy and suffering, the love and the hate, the hope and the despair of black people; and it moves the people toward the direction of total liberation ... affirm[ing] that black being is only possible in a communal context.”[xiv]

This book follows Fumi Okiji’s study of jazz’s “heterophonic chorus in revolution,” in which she encourages jazz historians to expand their sense of “both the loci of jazz work and the kinds of interaction that take place there.”[xv] Answering both Okiji’s call and the vibrant transnational networks of New Orleans’s Black Atlantic musicians, this book “follows the people” (and not only their music).[xvi] I do this through dissonant readings of state archives – police records, WPA interviews, Freedmen’s Bureau reports, plantation invoices – as well as those generated by a Black counterpublic, including Black newspapers, SAPC meeting notes, and musicians’ interviews – in order to trace the varied ideologies and soundscapes that animated brassroots democracy’s freedom dreams. One takeaway is that musicians  were  hybrid  ac-tors  with  a  variety  of commitments to Black social life; the line demarcating longshoreman, volunteer firefighter, civil rights activist, and trumpeter was thin or nonexistent. Clarinetist Willie Parker was involved in the union movement; James Humphrey and Kid Ory were urban farmers; Lorenzo Tio Sr. was born in a Black agricultural commune in Mexico; Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and George Lewis worked on the docks.[xvii] Understanding these experiences as tied to the development of early jazz is crucial to hear the worlds the music created. Pianist Vijay Iyer notes that jazz’s “story dwells not just in one solo at a time, but also in a single note, and equally in an entire lifetime of improvisations ... the story is revealed not as a simple linear narrative, but as a fractured, exploded one.”[xviii]1 By sounding their freedom dreams, dreams that encapsulated a transnational flow of overlapping emancipatory narratives, the new music that Sidney Bechet evoked prefigured a counter-plantation revolution throughout Louisiana and the South at large. While Reconstruction was ultimately repressed, its abolitionist imaginaries nonetheless threaded through the “birth” of early jazz. Its lexicon of rhythms, expressions of meter and groove, interplay of form and freedom, and genre of truth-telling to power connect the age of revolution in the Caribbean to Afro-Louisiana.

 

Notes:

i. Eqbal Ahmed, “How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won,” in The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, ed. Carolle Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 16–18.
ii. New Orleans Tribune, May 30, 1867.
iii. James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008).
iv. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1935).
v. George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (New York: Verso, 1994), 134.
vi. Justin Hosbey and J. T. Roane, “A Totally Different Form of Living: On the Legacies of Displacement and Marronage as Black Ecologies,” Southern Cultures 27, no. 1 (2021): 68–73.
vii. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 77–79; Report of 26–27 August 1837, Reports of the Captain of the Guard, vol. 2, First Municipality Guard Records, City Archives and Special Collections, New Orleans Public Library.
viii. Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Insurrection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 77, 289, 303, 309. For other instances, mentioned here see chapter 5.
ix. Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle (New York: Da Capo Press, 1960), 47–48.
x. On Black celebrations in Louisiana, see Michael D. Pierson, Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 14–15; see also chapter 5.
xi. Louisiana Democrat, October 2, 1867; Vincent, “Charles Vincent, “Black Louisianians During the Civil War and Reconstruction: Aspects of Their Struggles and Achievements,” in Louisiana’s Black Heritage, ed. Robert Macdonald, John Kemp, and Edward Haas (1979: Louisiana State Museum, 1979),” 94.
xii. Gilmore discusses the selection of liberatory lineages in her understanding of “infrastructures of feeling” in Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (New York: Verso Books, 2022).
xiii. Ajay Heble, Daniel Fischlin, and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
xiv. James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1992), 4–5.
xv. Fumi Okiji, Jazz As Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Berkeley: Stanford University Press, 2018), 9.
xvi. Anna Morcom, “Following the People, Refracting Hindustani Music, and Critiquing Genre-Based Research,” Ethnomusicology 66, no. 3 (January 1, 2022): 474.
xvii. Willie Parker, interview, November 7, 1958, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University; Dave Stuart, “Kid Ory,” Jazz Information 2, no. 9 (1940): 5–8; Karl Koenig, “The Plantation Belt and Musicians Part 1: Professor James B. Humphrey,” The Second Line XXXIII (Fall 1981): 24–49; Charles E. Kinzer, “The Tio Family: Four Generations of New Orleans Musicians, 1814-1933” (New Orleans, Louisiana, The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 1993); Emanuel Sayles, interview, January 17, 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University; “Freedom: A History of US. Biography. Louis Armstrong,” PBS, accessed September 11, 2023, https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/historyofus/web11/features/bio/B09.html.
xviii. Vijay Iyer, “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation.” In Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, 395.

 

© 2024 Benjamin Barson

 

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