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

by Charles 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  

Genres: Music, Jazz, History, Race, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Chadwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm in the middle of my second reading of this book, and I'd have to say that it is absolutely indispensable for any serious student of the history of jazz.
It's a fairly comprehensive survey of the roots, birth, and ascent of jazz in New Orleans, and as such I would recommend it as a well-researched primer for anyone interested in the subject, although there are better books for that purpose, such as Samuel Charters' A Trumpet Around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz. But Hersch's focus is more on the intersections of race and jazz. He traces the effects that this hybrid music had on the interactions and identities of Black, White, and Creole jazz musicians, listeners, and on the opponents of jazz music. For anyone comfortable with the idea of traditional jazz as hokey, safe, toothless music, this books stands as a testimonial for its power as a revolutionary art form.