Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz by Caroline Vézina (review)

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• Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz by Caroline Vézina
• Lauren Eldridge Stewart

Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz. By Caroline Vézina. American Made Music Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Pp. x, 236. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4242-8; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4240-4.)

In Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz, Caroline Vézina pulls together a variety of sources to create a collage of Creole identity, New Orleans racial politics, and the music that emerged from that milieu. The resulting product combines carefully mined research in jazz studies, creolization theory, and folklore. The book begins by outlining the unique origins of Louisiana. Unlike most of the United States, Louisiana was populated “as a cosmopolitan, but asymmetric, three-tiered Creole society under the French and Spanish Empires, closely tied to the Caribbean” (p. 10). As a result, people engaged regularly with one another across racial divides while being governed by a complex set of rules. However, these three tiers did not survive the American Civil War. The antebellum period was an important inflection point in Creole identity, forcing the racial structures of the rest of the United States into the Gulf Coast region. Black Creoles became simply Black, white Creoles became white, and language loss contributed to the disappearance of a once influential sector of society.

Vézina’s writing emphasizes this point, repeatedly pointing toward a community and identity that once existed more as fact than abstraction. She features the surviving narratives of two Creole women, one Black and one white, and their recollection of songs. The book is divided into two parts after the introduction and the opening material defining Creole identity. Part 1, “The Precursors of Jazz,” provides the reader with a soundscape of Louisiana around the turn of the twentieth century. Chapters in this section cover “Black American/French Creole Folk Music” (chap. 2), “French Religious Music” (chap. 3), and “European Music and Dances” (chap. 4). Throughout, the Creole narrators introduced in the first chapter furnish their impressions of and [End Page 425] interactions with these categories. The chapter on French religious music is particularly informative. The sub-chapter on classical music and Creole composers provides context for the widely known Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The reader gets a glimpse into his world and, perhaps more important for the literature, the world of his sister, Clara Gottschalk Petersen, who published a collection of Creole songs.

Part 2, “Early Jazz,” begins with a chapter profiling prominent Creole composers and musicians, such as Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, and Sidney Bechet. The final chapter covers the use of Creole songs in the jazz genre. Particularly notable in this section of the book is Vézina’s assertion that “by the early jazz age, the word Creole had become a free-floating signifier rather than the marker of a cultural identity” (p. 73). This shift in the meaning of the term had ramifications that echo to this very day: labeling cultural products, from food seasonings to music, as Creole is an effective marketing technique that connotes exoticism and garners interest.

This book would be of interest to students of Louisiana and Gulf Coast cultural history. The connections made between songs that seem wildly unalike at first listen prove valuable. Some sections (for example, the section “Voodoo Songs” but also, perhaps less obviously, the unrelated Creole-language song lyrics “Pam Patat”) would benefit from cross-referencing with existing Haitian folklore accounts. Though Louisiana Creole and Haitian Kreyòl are not identical languages, there are mutually intelligible inferences that the author might make that would further draw the reader in. The book also includes an extensive appendix, which contains an extended explanation of creolization and additional song lyrics and scores. Ultimately, Vézina strives to establish Creole as a bounded community rather than an ideology, but her subjects often elude her. Their genealogies and lived experience slip the boundary and support the sense of mystery around this cultural identity.

Lauren Eldridge Stewart Washington University in St. Louis Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association...