Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans. By Charles Hersch. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xiv, 289 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-32867-6.)

Abstract

Charles Hersch fills a historiographical gap by providing the first interpretive cultural study of early New Orleans jazz. This is surprising; the tropes, signifiers, discourses, and other indices of cultural conflict and change arising from the city's dangerous streets, shabby dance halls, multiracial brothels, lakeside bandstands, and parades and celebrations, circa 1880–1920, have long been ripe for theorizing. Earlier histories avoid such postmodern approaches, but they provide many suggestive illustrations of oppositional behavior, subversive textuality, and cultural hybridity among the Creoles of color, Sicilian and Irish immigrants, voodoo queens, pimps, roustabouts, and slumming white dance hall patrons who peopled the New Orleans scene. Hersch both repeats the narratives of other historians and realizes their inchoate interpretations. Like earlier histories, Subversive Sounds describes at length the Caribbean character of New Orleans society and the liminal social status of the city's Creoles of color, and finds both to be central to the formation of jazz. The degraded status of all African American residents in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) reflected the dominant white view that blacks threatened Caucasian racial purity; jazz, Hersch argues, boldly injected “impurity” into American music and culture. This is perhaps his most original argument, countering popular notions of New Orleans jazz as a cozy gumbo or melting pot of amicable white, Creole, and black influences. Hersch's introduction of the concepts of the carnivalesque (Mikhail Bakhtin) and heterotopia (Michel Foucault), though, add little to his analysis of the vigorous expressiveness of New Orleans street life, which covers familiar musical sites such as Congo Square, second line parades, and funeral marches. As an interpretation, Hersch's book resembles a lively bull session that clothes well-known historical data in mostly predictable interpretations. As a result, it only slightly modifies the prevailing narrative about the music. Hersch is a political scientist whose attention to chronology and use of analogies is more casual than that of most historians. This adds to the book's playful and suggestive nature but detracts from the persuasiveness of its interpretation. In contrast, Thomas Brothers's Louis Armstrong's New Orleans (2006), while less provocative, is more empirically thorough and original in its description of how musical materials cohered in specific times and places to create early New Orleans jazz.