Visible Voice Books will host a book signing by the author of Subversive Sounds, Charles Hersch on Saturday June 14 from 4pm to 5pm.
Hurricane
Katrina threatened to wash away the history of an incomparable,
culturally vibrant American city, while the aftermath exposed New
Orleans’ ugly deeply rooted racial divisions. Subversive Sounds,
Charles Hersch’s study of the role of race in the origins of jazz,
probes both sides of the city’s heritage, uncovering a web of racial
interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation
of a vital art form.
Drawing on oral histories, police reports,
newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Hersch brings to vivid life
the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. He shows how
musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong
negotiated New Orleans’ complex racial rules to pursue their craft and
how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety
of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources.
These encounters
with other music and other races subverted their own racial identities
and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the
shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and
indelibly transformed American culture.

Visible Voice Books is located at:
1023 Kenilworth Ave. (in Tremont)
Cleveland, OH 44113

Call 216.961.0084 for more info, or go to www.visiblevoicebooks.com