Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

by Charles B. Hersch

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 

304 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2008

Reviews

[Christopher]

"Thus in presenting his racial identity in his music and sometimes in his very person, the jazz musician had to be a protean figure, altering himself with his surroundings and speaking a variety of cultural languages in the music itself. Black, white, Creole musicians utilized and transformed African, European, and American forms of music, creating something new: jazz. Contrary to the claims of melting-pot historians, jazz did not emerge from a harmonic blending of cultures into a seamless whole. Rather, it came out of the struggles of musicians to negotiate changing political conditions, struggles that forced them to contend with different kinds of musicians and musical genres and in the process alter their identity. Out of these encounters, there emerged a new, hybrid music that refused to stay within the confines of a binary, hierarchical racial system." - Charles B Hersch