201 10.4324/9780429341427-23 19 “YOU CAN BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT AND YOU AIN’T GETTING NOWHERE” Jazz, collectivism, and the struggle for ecological commons in Louisiana’s sugar parishes Benjamin Barson Building off saxophonist and self-described matriarchal ecosocialist Fred Ho, who posited that jazz aesthetics both offer resistance to commodification and embody an “Eco-Logic[al] Aes- thetic,” I consider jazz as the product of an ecosocial set of relations that could be considered a precursor to ecosocialism (Ho 2011). I posit that New Orleans jazz cannot be understood apart from the agrarian commons fought for by the workforce of Louisiana’s sugar plantation economy (Scott 2005; Gould 1984). Sugar informed the lives of early jazz musicians, from the folkways of communities working the crop to the migrations and markets that pro-sugar impe- rial policy engendered to the anti-plantation resistance this economy engendered. A generation of jazz, including Ben and Chris Kelly, bassist Pops Foster, and trombonist Kid Ory, grew up on Louisiana sugar plantations. In the following pages, I examine how Black Louisianan music cultures reflected the same drive for autonomy observed in the act of growing one’s own food. By tracing the politics of land, labour, and music making in the sugar belt in the decades following the Civil War and Reconstruction, I suggest that we can hear in the New Orleans brass band the sounds and struggles of the commons. I foreground the variety of ways that Black musicians and activists responded to the infrastructure and social relations that the produc- tion of sugar required. I take a regional approach so as to locate Black Louisianan sugar workers’ resistance within a broader Afro-Caribbean struggle against the sugar system. In addition to marronage and, in the post-emancipation years, strikes, it is through the pro- liferation of gardens that a coherent Black agrarian praxis rooted in communal land tenure systems – a predecessor of contemporary US Black southern variants of ecosocialism – can be seen (Akuno 2019). Tracing social relations in sonic production can be a difficult and perhaps overly speculative task, but it is striking that musicians themselves often emphasized communal phenomenology as essential to creating good music. As trombonist Jim Robinson, born on the Deer Range