"Ben Barson's Brassroots Democracy is a brilliant historical intervention in early jazz studies as it expands upon our social and cultural understanding of Louisiana musical and political history as part of the revolutionary diaspora of the Haitian Revolution. Especially valuable is his ability to keep in our ears the music even as he explains how the sounds are embedded in working class, creolized, communities that fought, and continue to fight, against patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy."
~Salim Washington, Professor of Global Jazz Studies, UCLA
"With stunning originality, Benjamin Barson reveals a new revolutionary genealogy of jazz, based in the popular struggles of Haiti, Mexico, and the plantation regions of the American South. Don't miss this bold musical history from below. There is no other book like it."
~Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History
"Ben Barson explores the sonic complexities of Afro-Atlantic performative cultures in Louisiana through the Haitian Revolution, U.S. Reconstruction, and the era of jazz. He critically examines the intersections of Black working-class musicality and resistance in the pursuit of a future grounded in equality and solidarity."
~Michele Reid-Vazquez, author of The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
"Ambitious and unique, this book will change the way you think about New Orleans music. Barson situates the emergence of jazz within 19th-century political movements, linking music to calls for civil rights in New Orleans with Haiti, Cuba, Mexico and beyond. A welcome example of 'history from below' that is all-too-rare in music studies and New Orleans studies."
~Matt Sakakeeny, Associate Professor at Tulane University
"Musician, composer, scholar Benjamin Barson places the origins of the music dubbed 'jazz' in its rightful place: the Black Radical Tradition. Deftly braiding the political and cultural histories of revolutionary Haiti, Black Reconstruction, the laboring and creative lives of workers and peasants of the Black Atlantic, African and Indigenous memory in song, story, and dance, Black feminist blues, and resistance to racial capitalism, he weaves a powerful story of how Black revolt and brass bands transformed the port city of New Orleans into a portal to musical revolution. From now on, Brassroots Democracy should be our starting point—both for understanding the past and imagining an emancipatory future."
~Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
