Benjamin Barson

Benjamin Barson is a composer, historian, and musicologist. His book Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Weslyean 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.