Sunday 21 June 2026, 3pm
How Black Music Took Over the World takes readers inside the vibrant world that underlies Black musical creation, demonstrating the impact that the musical inheritance of Africa has had on music today. Beginning with two rhythmic building blocks he calls the cell and the frame, musician, composer and cultural theorist Melvin Gibbs reveals Black music as an organised system of knowledge. Blending cultural history and musical analysis, he explores how Black music has shaped nearly every music genre on the planet, from carnival music in Brazil to rap ciphers in New York and global pop. How Black Music Took Over the World explores rhythm, vibration and movement to challenge Western musical hierarchies and offer new tools for understanding our musical heritage.
"A revelatory new book." - New York Times
"Melvin's prose grooves just as hard as his bass playing." - W. Kamau Bell, comedian, author, and director
"A compelling and immersive journey, not only into music’s DNA, but also into why and how it does what it does to us. Conclusion: music is life and inextricably woven into the human experience. A deeply researched and well-written work." - Henry Rollins, writer and radio show host
"Insightful, revelatory, and informative." - Meshell Ndegeocello, singer-songwriter and poet
Melvin Gibbs is a composer, musician, artist and writer, born, raised, and currently based in Brooklyn, N.Y. He has been called "the greatest bassist in the world" by Time Out New York magazine and is the 2019 winner of JazzTimes Magazine's Critics Poll in the category: Electric Bass.
His wide-ranging musical resume includes membership in the bands Defunkt, The Decoding Society, Power Tools with Bill Frisell & Ronald Shannon Jackson, the alt-rock Rollins Band (where he was nominated for a Grammy), The Zig Zag Power Trio with Vernon Reid and Will Calhoun of the band Living Colour, Socialybrium with Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame inductee Bernie Worrell, and production and performance work with artists including Femi Kuti, Caetano Veloso, dead prez, Eddie Palmieri, David Byrne, Arto Lindsay and Sonny Sharrock to name a few.
He has composed music for films, installations, and performances for visual artists including Matthew Barney, Stan Douglas, and Arthur Jafa.
For 20+ years he has been a member of the band Harriet Tubman, who The New York Times wrote gave one of “The Best Jazz Performances of 2017” and NPR wrote gave “The Best Jazz Performance of 2018”.
Kevin Le Gendre is a journalist and broadcaster with an interest in black music, literature and culture. Since the late 90s he has written about soul, jazz, African and Caribbean musicians and authors for a wide variety of publications that includes Echoes, Jazzwise, The Independent, The Guardian and Vibrations [Switzerland]. He has also contributed to and presented programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4 such as Jazz Line Up and Front Row. In 2013 his first book Soul Unsung: Reflections On The Band In Black Popular Music was published to critical acclaim by Equinox.
