Book Review

Problematic metaphors about New Orleans jazz occur rampantly in jazz history.Comparing the music to a melting pot, mosaic, and even gumbo attempts to capture its multicultural influences.Caroline Vézina challenges these romanticized ideas by demonstrating the profound impact of Creole culture on jazz's formation.In Jazz À La Creole: French Creole Music & The Birth of Jazz, Vézina dispels the myth that only Creole habaneras and quadrilles shaped jazz's development.Rather this culture's contributions span over a century beginning with the first enslaved Africans in Louisiana.Drawing extensively on primary sources, this book is divided into two sections, "The Precursors of Jazz," which include folk, religious, and dance music, and "Early Jazz."With these, Vézina provides a necessary, if imperfect, revision to the narrative surrounding the music of a complex ethnic group in New Orleans.First, Vézina explores the meaning of the word "creole," taking the reader through its Portuguese and Spanish origins during the seventeenth century to its use in Louisiana to describe both white and Black people born in the New World during the nineteenth century.Vézina uses creolization, despite the theory's complicated history, to describe jazz's creation, "for it better represents the intricate multilayered, and dynamic aspect of the process during which various elements of diverse cultures get intertwined as people adapt to new or changing environments in which creolized products or practices can themselves be part of a new process of creolization" (9). 1 Vézina elaborates on creolization's complex history and its prior uses in a section in the appendix, but commits to the theory anyway because of its ability to represent cultural interactions.In her work, creolization is combined with Mark Slobin's work on micromusics and those musics' involvement with subcultures.The chapter closes with insight from firsthand accounts of white and Black creoles to explain their experience 1 Anthropologist Richard Price has warned scholars about the implications of using such theories because of its entanglement with créolisation and globalization.