Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Ibero-American Music Study Group.

This session, given in-person at the University of Texas at Austin and livestreamed to the AMS Annual Meeting, presents a research process for writing an Atlantic “music history from below” by assembling archival ephemera: stray transcriptions, police traces, fugitive notices, and oral history fragments that rarely survive as conventional music sources. The guiding premise is methodological. Following historian Marisa Fuentes, I treat absence and fragment not as endpoints but as provocations to reconstruct spatial and historical context, shifting interpretation toward subaltern perspectives. In the context of early jazz, this context-work is constitutive. When left undone, African American and Latin American working-class musical activity during the Jim Crow period appears detached from forms of social organization, historical knowledge, and political struggle.

The session anchors this method in a single, neglected artifact: Alice Zeno’s recollection of a “Song from Haiti,” preserved in William Russell’s interview materials at the Hogan Jazz Archive. Jazz scholarship has often used Zeno’s partial recall to adjudicate questions of acculturation or diffusion while treating her reference to Haiti as incidental. I reframe that oversight through Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s account of the Haitian Revolution’s historical silencing. Haiti does not vanish because it was marginal; it vanishes because bringing it into view forces a different story about resistance, mobility, and political imagination in the nineteenth-century circum-Caribbean than one which American exceptionalist narratives can afford to hold.

Rather than offering a definitive interpretation, I demonstrate the practical steps by which one can trace multiple genealogies from such ephemera through searching instances of "cross-posting" across disparate archives. These help frame echoes, resonances, and parallel emissions that help us map spatial relations among ports, labor routes, and sites of policing; they lend towards a timeline of overlapping transmission; and allow us to read archival distortions as evidence of what threatened the social order. This procedure moves from a single line in an interview transcript to a wider world of Afro-Latin Caribbean circulation that reshapes how we understand early jazz's preconditions.

I conclude by outlining how this context-first method extends into twentieth-century Cuba, including preliminary pathways toward research on Julio Cueva and the infrastructures under U.S. empire through which sound, labor, and politics moved across Veracruz, New Orleans, and Haiti.