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. Black brass bands and activists rehearsed participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction--"Brassroots Democracy." Benjamin Barson presents this "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes.
Benjamin Barson is a saxophonist, historian, radical educator, and organizer. His research thinks through jazz as an Afro-Atlantic art form deeply tied to the counter-plantation legacies of the Haitian Revolution and their echoes in Radical Reconstruction. He is an assistant professor of music at Bucknell University. He received his PhD in Music from the University of Pittsburgh and recently completed a Fulbright Garcia-Robles postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexicali, Mexico and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University’s Africana Studies & Research Center.
