“Black music is a form of sonic creation developed in the West that is rooted in and reflects the thoughts and experiences of people who trace their heritage back to West Africa,” writes Melvin Gibbs in his book ‘How Black Music Took Over the World.’ Gibbs, a bassist, songwriter and thinker from New York. “You could say that Black music is the sonification of their culture, which was built on the foundation of knowledge their ancestors brought with them. Those ancestors used music to depict their experience of consciousness and evoke that original vibration. The first African American music makers understood that our world makes our sound.”
It is this idea that drives Gibbs’ view, animating his writings an author and a player. “Recognizing that our universe is fundamentally vibratory, the first African Americans understood existence as cyclical. This means, in their view, existence is rhythm. Nature is rhythm. And, of course, as a part of nature. our bodies are rhythm. The perception of people operating on the basis of this cultural is that the world is made of and emits rhythm.
“This conception of the existence of rhythm works in tandem with these cultures’ conception of time. In the West, the common image of time is that of direct movement in a straight line. The cultural groups that formed the basis of the Black population hold a different view. For them, time is curved, elliptical.”
One of the beautiful elements is how Gibbs journey as a young sideman inform his vision of performing, comparing his time in soul bands to the punk of Henry Rollins. “From the science of Black music perspective,” Gibbs writes, “that means understanding the meaning of the music I’m playing to the people who ingest it… For the people at the starter gigs I was playing, that meaning was rooted in their teenage years, in the 1950s and ‘60s. For the people listening to the version of the Rollins Band I was in, its rooted in the ‘90s. For people going to a popular music festival this summer, its rooted in the present day.”
One of the many sharp observations Gibbs makes his the difference between how he interprets the famous Robert Johnson legend, where the bluesman met the Devil at a Mississippi crossroads and was given devilish mastery of his guitar. Referencing the Christian “Devil” as “the Big Black Man,” Gibbs writes, “The Big Black Man will give his supplicant the power to play Black music in the Blackest way. A person educated and situated in a Eurocentric Christian mode of thought would think, what else could he be but the devil? But, in the Songhay languages, which are the languages spoken in parts of West Africa where the local music has a strong similarity to the blues, black has a totally different connotation. The word bibi, “black,” refers to essential goodness, clarity, and depth. The clearest water, which comes from the depths of the river, is called hari hari — “black water.” The time of day when the sun is strongest is called wayne bibi — “black sun.” Strength, clarity, and goodness is what you’d be implying if you anthropomorphized this concept by creating the Big Black Man. Of course, that’s not the image a Big Black Man represented in Western society at Robert Johnson’s time.”
All these quotes are a taste of Gibbs’s research, erudition and range of reference in his ambition and deeply felt ‘How Black Music Took Over the World.’ Any serious student of black music needs to check out this work by a scholar/ practitioner.
This is an incredible book!