The Barry S. Brook Center is pleased to announce that the 2025 Barry and Claire Brook Award has been awarded to Benjamin Barson for Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons.

The selection committee reached this decision unanimously after reviewing an exceptionally strong and diverse shortlist. Barson’s study stood out for its profound reimagining of jazz history and its exemplary embodiment of the award’s mission.

Brassroots Democracy reframes jazz not as a narrowly defined national tradition but as a hemispheric, African diasporic creation shaped by the Maroon communities formed by escaped enslaved people across the American South, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Through the interwoven concepts of maroon ecologies and the jazz commons, Barson illuminates jazz as a practice rooted in resistance, collective creativity, and sustainable cultural exchange. His argument powerfully challenges Western-centric narratives of musical progress, genius, and ownership.

The committee was especially impressed by the book’s methodological innovation and narrative force. Barson combines critical theory, archival depth, and compelling biographical storytelling to reveal how musical traditions emerge through global networks of circulation and intercultural encounters. This work not only contributes to current scholarship—it offers a new paradigm for understanding the development of music in a global context.

In awarding the 2025 Brook Award to Brassroots Democracy, the committee affirms that Barson’s study most fully realizes the award’s aims: to honor scholarship that foregrounds global circulation, transculturation, ecological and social entanglements, and the dismantling of hegemonic narratives in music history.

We congratulate Benjamin Barson on this outstanding achievement and celebrate the transformative contribution his work makes to global music historiography.