But black music is a completely different story. It brings with call-and-response and layers of syncopation in this rougher element that we call “noise.” But is this unique sound that arises from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument. Basically what I’m talking about is that like “err,” what I call “scraping the bottom of the pan” get all those good bits up. “Stank” is another word for it. You know “putting their foot in it,” “losing it,” you know lots of — we have lots of expressions for how good black music is. But there’s something even more fundamental to it than these elements of noise and syncopation. And it’s improvisation. It’s one of the most crucial elements of what we think of as black music. And this isn’t to say that rehearsal doesn’t happen and black musicians don’t practice and they don’t compose and write stuff down. That’s — all those things are true. But separate in how we think of the difference between what we call white music and what we think of as black music is this idea of improvisation. And it essentially is the raising of individual creativity and expression to the highest possible place in the world of a song. Basically a black musician is free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation when he’s making music. Through music that no one composed, “composed,” music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope, of communion. And it can’t be really, fully copied. You don’t — you just don’t copy it because it can’t be copied. You embody it. You are it. Frederick Douglass bemoaned white minstrel performers as the filthy scum of white society. And he would have been one of the few people who had an opportunity to actually make that character—— one of the few black people who would have had an opportunity to make that characterization. But in minstrels’ wake you begin to see black performers on stage and hear them record as themselves. People like Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. Here some of them are right here. You get Fats Waller, and Ma Rainey, and Cab Calloway, and Muddy Waters. And for the first time, you find a fully black human self in American popular art. At the same time, you have the injustice and brutality of Jim Crow, you also have something like Blue Note Records. You have black musicians thinking about how to move art forward. But not just black art. American art. You had Charlie Parker. You had Chuck Berry. You had Motown. Ah, Motown. The Motown project was to take white Western musical ideas of orchestration, strings and horns, straightforward harmonies, melodies, and marry those to a weekend where on a Saturday night, you’re at a juke joint having a good time, with, say, the jump blues, and then the next day — basically the jump blues, by the way, a guitar, drums, bass. And on Sunday morning, you drag your hangover over to church. A church like 16th Street Baptist. A place where the hymns come with hand claps, and holy harmonic arrangements, and call-and-response, and a lot of feeling. A lot of stank. A lot of noise. Motown, you see, was the antidote to American minstrelsy. On a song like “Heat Wave,” you can actually hear the hands slapping the tambourine like it actually is Sunday morning. And it, to me, is just the most exciting, romantic sound you’re ever going to hear, at the center of what can only be described as refulgent and regal blackness. And if we’re talking about Martha and the Vandellas still, and I actually still am, It’s interesting to think that those three women are what those four little girls never grow up to be and what you hear in Motown, what you hear in black music is possibility, struggle and strife. Yes, it is certainly true. But you also hear humor, and sex, and confidence. And that, of course, is ironic because this is the sound of a people who for decades and centuries have been denied freedom. They’ve been denied what you respond to in black music, which is the ultimate expression of a belief in that freedom. A belief that the struggle is worth it, that the pain begets joy, that the joy you’re experiencing is not only contagious, it’s necessary, and urgent and irresistible. Black music is American music because as Americans, we say we believe in freedom. We say that’s our core value — our biggest moral export. And the power of black music, for this country, is that it’s always been the sound of freedom.