Four years ago the writer and musician Ned Sublette published his first book, the magnificent Cuba and Its Music. This work single-handedly changed my view, for instance, to the Cuban origins of many rhythms I’d never attributed to that island.

Sublette’s sophomore effort is equally enlightening, though more sobering. The World That Made New Orleans, deals above all with slavery and its effects in the Caribbean and America, and of course the Crescent City. And the particular depravities of that institution don’t make for easy reading.

For the Founding Fathers Worshipping Clan, this book will be difficult as well. Sublette takes dead aim at Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder (he owned more than 600 in his lifetime) and the great enabler of slavery in the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. As Sublette puts it: “By focusing on Jefferson as he looked from the perspective of slavery, it may be objected that I am presenting a one-sided vision of a complex man. To which I say, there are hundreds of books that extol his achievements, and his face is carved into a mountainside in South Dakota. His virtues are well-known.”

The book starts slowly, as the complex machinations between Spain, France, Britain and the U.S. colonies are meticulously laid out. Eventually the early city takes shape, and the connections Sublette makes are enlightening. There may not be all that much new info in this book, but Sublette’s synthesis of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Henry Kmen and dozens of other sources, combined with his own life experiences (childhood in Natchitoches, residencies in New Orleans, extended visits to Cuba and adulthood in New York City) give him unique insights. Thus he is able, for instance, in one of the book’s few technical passages, to draw parallels between the rhythmic feel of traditional Senegambian music as brought to Cuba and America by the slaves, and the “notes inegales” (unequal notes) of the French Baroque taught by the Ursuline Sisters. “I would also note,” he writes, “the sometimes extreme fondness for melisma in New Orleans (e.g., the ornamentation of Aaron Neville’s singing or James Booker’s piano playing), which is an attribute of both the French Baroque and the music of the Islamized Senegambia.” Heady stuff.

Eventually, the overarching importance of the 1791 Haitian Revolution and the diaspora of thousands to Eastern Cuba and 10 years later to New Orleans become clear (“It is not too much to say that it was one of the generative explosions of popular music in the hemisphere”). There is eloquent and informed writing about Congo Square, and a concluding chapter that ties the long ago to today’s Mardi Gras Indians.

Sublette is currently working on a memoir about his time in New Orleans. After that, I suggest he consider a history of New Orleans music. No one has written a great one, and he has the track record to show he can pull it off.