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Musician Melvin Gibbs has built a career over decades nimbly crossing genres. As a young man, he considered becoming a DJ but picked up the bass instead.

“I like the physicality of the instrument,” he said. “The fact that it moves in you and makes you move.”

He broke onto the scene in 1980s Brooklyn, N.Y., as a member of the band Defunkt. He played experimental rock with Rollins Band in the 1990s. And for decades, he’s toured with his jazz trio, Harriet Tubman.

That’s just a sample of the dozens of projects Gibbs has been involved in over the years. These days, he splits his time between Minneapolis and Brooklyn. 

And he has a new book out April 14, “How Black Music Took Over the World” — part memoir, part history, part scientific look at how rhythmic building blocks developed within the African diaspora have spread across the world. 

“The melodic information that people are interested in changes over time, but the rhythmic information has not changed since the beginning,” Gibbs said. 

He spoke with MPR News host Clay Masters about the book. 

Press play above to listen to their conversation, or read a transcript below, edited for time and clarity.

You wrote early on…  if you use the definition of Black that’s traditionally been used in the United States, a standard that's based on the idea that ‘one drop of Black blood makes you Black,’ you'd have to say that the majority of music popular on our planet today is Black music.

All the music that we hear is rooted in the music that Black Americans make, from the simplest thing to the rhythms you hear on the radio, like if you listen in ‘K-Pop Demon Hunters’…. the rhythm came from Black Americans. 

What we think of as American music, at the root, what makes it unique … is the fact that, you know, Africans in America had to come up with a new way of making music.

Gibbs playing with Rollins Band at Woodstock '94

Can you talk a little bit about what you get into in this book?

I mean, it's kind of my life story, which has a purpose of framing the other two buckets, which is this thing that I call the geometry of rhythm, the very particular rhythms that Black Americans developed. And the other bucket is Black music and Black culture, and culture in general as an evolutionary process, and how that evolution forms us as people and forms the things that we do.

So you, at one point, are writing about when you were a young man and looking through different records in a collection. And you said that the music was, ‘like nothing I had heard before, but also like everything I had heard before.’

I guess I was 14, 15, and I hadn't really had any serious exposure to traditional African music. You know, you have African dance class music, but it's not the deep traditional stuff.

So my mentor played some music for me, and the rhythms were just kind of like James Brown, but not because everything kind of leaned differently, but I can definitely hear that what was in it that related to what I the music that I liked at that time.

Gibbs playing with the Sonny Sharrock Quartet

Some readers might expect a straightforward history of music, but that's not what this book is, right? You get a mix of memoir, history and even math, as you alluded to, musical notations you use to describe rhythm.

Well, the notation system that I'm using is what I call clock notation, which is a different notation system than is used in the West. 

I thought about the fact in the old days, when you go in the studio, people used to say that drummers are like a clock. And then from there, I was kind of like, maybe I can write the rhythm in a circular way, as opposed to in a flat way. 

And it's the thing that's interesting about that is like, even if you don't understand music notation, you can see that there's a structure to what's going on that you can't really see if you look at it through Western notation.

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Musician Melvin Gibbs has built a career over decades nimbly crossing genres. He spoke with MPR News host Clay Masters about his new book, “How Black Music Took Over the World,” described as part memoir, part history and part science. 

Minneapolis bassist Melvin Gibbs traces rhythmic building blocks with 'How Black Music Took Over the World'

New book with Minneapolis roots tells ‘How Black Music Took Over the World’

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