Benjamin Barson

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Andrew Swenson, of Postindustrial

Ben Barson and Gizelxanath Rodriguez

media release: Join saxophonist Benjamin Barson and vocalist/guitarist Gizelxanath Rodriguez to celebrate the publication of Barson's book Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons. Named a top book of the 2024 by PopMatters, Brassroots Democracy celebrates the African American and Afro-Latinx grassroots labor organizers, civil rights activists, and blueswomen who in 1890s New Orleans came together to create the music we now call jazz. Barson and Rodriguez will be performing songs depicted in the book, and especially the revolutionary anthems from Haiti and Mexico which circulated in New Orleans during this period. Joining Barson and Rodriguez will be UW-Madison's Blue Note Ensemble, under the direction of Johannes Walmann, director of Jazz Studies at the Mead Witter School of Music.

About Benjamin Barson: Benjamin Barson is a composer, historian, and musicologist. His book Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) thinks through jazz as an Afro-Atlantic art form deeply tied to the counter-plantation legacies of the Haitian Revolution and their echoes in Radical Reconstruction. He received his PhD in Music from the University of Pittsburgh and recently completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University and a Fulbright Garcia-Robles postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Mexicali, Mexico. Barson’s research rethinks migration, agency, and cultural resistance, and has published on topics ranging from the musical cultures of Chinese indenture in the late nineteenth century United States South (The Cargo Rebellion, PM Press, 2023) to the legacy of Haitian migrants in early Louisianan blues (in The Routledge Handbook to Jazz and Gender, 2022). Barson is the recipient of the 2018 Johnny Mandel Prize from the ASCAP Foundation for this distinguished work as a jazz saxophonist and composer. Barson, disturbed by the incredible oppression wrought by white supremacy and the destruction of global ecology, employs a musical practice that draws from the deep well of revolutionary musicians within the jazz tradition, often composing through a collaborative process with activists and social movement leaders in the Global South. His work Mirror Butterfly: The Migrant Liberation Movement Suite (2018) was hailed as “Fully orchestrated and magnificently realized” (The Vermont Standard) as well as “a call to action” (I Care if You Listen). Barson’s teaching encourages students to consider musical aesthetics and their associated production practices through a holistic, interdisciplinary approach rooted in methodologies developed by scholars in Africana studies, musicology, cultural studies, and Atlantic History from below.

About Gizelxanath Rodriguez: Gizelxanath Rodriguez is an internationally renowned vocalist, cellist, guitarist and educator. Her musical work spans a range of styles and cultures. Gizelxanath has led several bands with her partner, Benjamin Barson, including the Afro Yaqui Music Collective, Insurrealistas, and Latin Sway. These projects have been presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., by the ASCAP Jazz awards in Los Angeles, and many other leading national venues. Gizelxanath has produced three solo albums and continues her life as an educator. She has been an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020 and has taught music throughout various private and public schools in the Pittsburgh and upstate NY areas for a period of ten years. Rodriguez was the Interdisciplinary artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020, where she taught “Artivism: Decolonizing Performance through Intercultural Solidarity.” She has performed at social movement gatherings in Kurdistan, Iraq; Veroes, Venezuela; and in Puerto Rico. She currently teaches voice at Bucknell University.