Richie Blondet
Son Montuno
JAZZ STUDIES COLLABORATIVE
RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM
EXPLORING LA FRONTERA SÓNICA IN NEW ORLEANS
PRESENTED BY BEN BARSON
THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2023
2PM EASTERN
RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM
EXPLORING LA FRONTERA SÓNICA IN NEW ORLEANS
PRESENTED BY BEN BARSON
THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2023
2PM EASTERN
Our next colloquium will be a presentation by baritone saxophonist/scholar Ben Barson, entitled “Exploring La Frontera Sónica.” Ben has provided the following description of his presentation:
The depth and extent of Black United States and Mexican connections in the nineteenth century is a subject that is still undergoing intense revision in the past decade. During the nineteenth century, Black, Indigenous, and Mexican borderlands communities pursued a strategy of “alternative emancipation,” creating forms of belonging and citizenship outside of traditional nation-state structures.
My presentation explores the exchange of musical culture that that resulted from these histories of migration and transborder collaboration. Benito Juárez and Ignacio Comonfort, two leaders of the Mexican revolution, resided in New Orleans in exile in 1855, where they worked as cigar rollers. New Orleans also included relocated Mexican military musicians who moved to the Crescent City in the 1880s. I conceptualize this ongoing crossborder space where alternative emancipations and new sounds were shared as la frontera sónica. La frontera can refer to both “the border” as a construction of states and empires, as well “borderlands,” the geographic and social spaces that emerge at the intersection of two or more linguistic, political, and cultural worlds, often created by those who the border crosses. The borderland (frontera) is a site that can evade the hegemonic values of nation-states and empires, pointing to possibilities not imagined by either, and those values can, in turn, influence the dominant culture of the states in which its subjects are positioned.
The traffic between New Orleans and Mexico went two ways, two clarinetists in the Excelsior Brass Band embodied this transborder history. These were the brothers Louis Tio (1862-1922) and Lorenzo Tio Sr. (1867-1908), two of New Orleans’s most highly accomplished Afro-Creole clarinetists. They were also Mexican nationals. Louis and Lorenzo Sr.’s parents, Thomas Louis Marcos Tio (1828-1878) and Louise Marguerite Anthenais Hazeur (1830-1903), had moved to Veracruz at the invitation of the Mexican revolutionary government of Ignacio Comonfort and Benito Juárez in 1860. This paper thinks through a transborder genealogy of jazz and discusses the implications of the “Latin Tinge” in New Orleans music. Building off of years of fieldwork with jazz musicians in Mexicali, Mexico, I consider transborder jazz as a decolonial project with implications for the field.
Ben Barson’s work lives at the intersection of academic, activist, and performing arts worlds. His research on jazz musician Fred Ho’s activism. He is an ASCAP award-winning composer and protégé of the late baritone saxophonist and composer, Fred Ho, and has been published as a chapter on Ho in the volume Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (2020).
Barson has been unrelenting is his commitment to make music that fights racism, inequality, and the destruction of the planet. He has been acknowledged as a “Pittsburgh arts innovator” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) and his work has been called “utterly compelling” (I Care if You Listen), “fully orchestrated and magnificently realized” (Vermont Standard) and “pushing boundaries in a well-conceived way.” (Midwest Review). He is the 2022-23 Fulbright García-Robles Postdoctoral Scholar at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexicali, Mexico and the Johnny Mandel Prize Winner (2018) in Jazz Composition from ASCAP.
Please join us using the following Zoom link:
Time: 1400 ET March 23, 2023
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88591415483?pwd=ODZBMnN5dE9QQ0dPQ3FaeXlYVlZkdz09
(ID: 885 9141 5483
Passcode: 022217)
Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kdlxMTLDih