“Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons: Fugitive Musicianship in nineteenth-century Afro-Louisiana”

Abstract: "'From verb to noun' means the erasure of black inventiveness through white appropriation." So wrote Nathaniel Mackey in response to the reification of African American cultural strategies into static, reified, and policed forms. To counteract this tendency, Mackey called on musicians and cultural workers to "confront the neotraditionalism that has taken hold of late with a counter-tradition of marronage, divergence, flight, and fugitive tilt."

Mackey is among a constellation of Black theorists who have employed the language of marronage—the historic process of Afrodiasporic exodus from plantations—to draw our attention to the productive symbolic dissonance provoked by Black musical traditions. Fred Moten, Paul Gilroy, and Édouard Glissant have all employed the metaphor of marronage to think through how flight from plantations and the rupturing of modernity’s logo-centric epistemology are conjoined processes. Marronage is also invoked amongst both contemporary and historic jazz artists, from flautist Nicole Mitchell Gantt’s composition “Maroon Cloud,” to saxophonist Fred Ho’s maroon-dedicated suites, to bassist William Parker’s celebration of his maroon ancestry, to clarinetist Sidney Bechet claiming the origin of jazz in his maroon grandfather’s rebellion against New Orleans police forces. If all these examples gesture towards the productive collapse of antebellum and late-capitalist temporalities in search of an abolitionist continuum, might thinking through early New Orleans jazz through the eco-social relations produced by Louisianan maroons help us reimagine the kind of “democracy” embedded in the “jazz-as-democracy” metaphor?

This paper outlines the conceptual framework of my recent monograph, Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons, to explore this thesis using methodologies and sources inspired by historians of the Black Atlantic. I develop contrapuntal readings of state archives—most centrally, police reports of arrests made in the First and Third municipal districts of antebellum New Orleans—that demonstrate how music making was both a product of maroon communities and a condition for its possibility. Methodologically, I employ a synthesis of “music history from below,” and, invoking Saidiya Hartman, a form of critical fabulation that sifts through “the ruins of the dismembered past” in order to reimagine the fragmentary information these records provide. Such work entails, according to Hartman, “an impossible goal: redressing the violence that produced numbers, ciphers, and fragments of discourse, which is as close as we come to a biography of the captive and the enslaved.”

While citing antebellum police records is a complicated task—they are tinged with racial designations and degrading language that reflects the violence of the slave system and the production of race in the nineteenth-century world—they are also important records where against-the-grain readings can illuminate how musicians were important agents for their own and others’ liberation. Johari Jabir suggests that the archives generated by state and colonial power in which Black music figures prominently must be listened to with what Johari Jabir calls “postcolonial ears,” that is, “a listening hermeneutics that accounts for the sonic work in black music as an aural epistemology.” For just as music illuminates this history from below, it is also true that situating Atlantic geographies of violence and brutality, resistance and revolution, is vital to hearing the aural episteme that produced the music and the strategies by which it was enacted.

Bio: Benjamin Barson (he/him) is a composer, historian, and musicologist who explores jazz as an Afro-Atlantic art form deeply connected to the counter-plantation legacies of the Haitian Revolution and their resonances in Radical Reconstruction. He is an assistant professor of music at Bucknell University. He earned his PhD in Music from the University of Pittsburgh. He has recently completed a Fulbright Garcia-Robles postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexicali, Mexico, an artistic residency at the University of Wisconsin’s Division of the Arts, and a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center.

Barson’s work broadly develops the field of “music history from below.” His recent book on the abolitionist musical cultures of nineteenth century New Orleans, titled Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan University Press) has been hailed as “stunning[ly] original” (Marcus Rediker) and “our starting point—both for understanding the past and imagining an emancipatory future.” (Robin D. G. Kelley) In addition to his monograph, he has published on topics ranging from the musical cultures of Chinese indenture in the late nineteenth-century United States South (The Cargo Rebellion, PM Press, 2023) to the influence of Haitian migrants in early Louisianan blues (in The Routledge Handbook to Jazz and Gender, 2022).

Barson is also a saxophonist and composer, and received the 2018 Johnny Mandel Prize from the ASCAP Foundation for his composition “Insurrealista.” Disturbed by the incredible oppression wrought by white supremacy and the destruction of global ecology, Barson employs a musical practice that draws from the deep well of revolutionary musicians within the jazz tradition, often composing through a collaborative process with activists and social movement leaders in the Global South. His work Mirror Butterfly: The Migrant Liberation Movement Suite (2018) was hailed as “Fully orchestrated and magnificently realized” (The Vermont Standard) as well as an “utterly compelling… funk-inspired call to action” (I Care if You Listen). His teaching encourages students to consider musical aesthetics and their associated production practices through a holistic, interdisciplinary approach rooted in methodologies developed by scholars in Africana studies, musicology, cultural studies, and Atlantic History from below.

Co-hosted by the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh; The Staughton and Alice Lynd Working-Class History Seminar, Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh; Carnegie Mellon University Department of History; and Carnegie Mellon University Center for the Arts in Society.