Subversive Sounds
Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans
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
Association for Recorded Sound Collections: Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence
Won
“Subversive Sounds underscores the importance of thinking in subtle, complex, and nuanced ways about the relationship between jazz and race. Engagingly written and cleverly framed, Hersch's work displays ample skill and vision while showing us how profoundly race mattered in early New Orleans jazz. This valuable and important book belongs on the top shelf of new jazz studies.”—John Gennari, author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics
“Subversive Sounds is as thoroughly researched as it is groundbreaking. In his study of New Orleans jazz, Charles Hersch is scrupulously sensitive to the music, but he has also surveyed the birthplace of jazz with the keen eye of a social historian. I was especially impressed by his willingness to consider the role of white players—as well as black and Creole musicians—in the racial politics of early jazz.”—Krin Gabbard, author of Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and American Cinema
New Orleans Maps
Opening Riff: Jelly Roll Morton’s Stars and Stripes
Introduction
1 Places
2 Reaction
3 Musicians
4 Music
5 Dissemination: Morton, La Rocca, and Armstrong
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Discography and Videography
Index
History: American History
Music: Ethnomusicology
Political Science: Race and Politics
Sociology: Urban and Rural Sociology
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