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This part affirms Black music as history itself: a living organism that continues to grow, respond, and create new forms of expression with each generation.

This part frames hip-hop not simply as a genre, but as a living cultural system rooted in African diasporic traditions of oral history, rhythm, improvisation, and communal exchange.

This part situates Black music within a broader ecosystem of revolutionary cultural production, where sound becomes strategy and creativity becomes practice of freedom.

This part frames funk not only as a musical genre, but as a cultural practice that fused pleasure with politics and embodied freedom.

This part frames soul as the soundtrack of a people insisting on being seen, heard, and felt in full color.

This part frames gospel as a sacred continuation of the blues and spirituals, and as a musical force that energized the Civil Rights era and beyond.

This part frames jazz as both a continuation of African musical logic and a radical reimagining of musical possibility within modern urban life.

This part frames the blues not simply as a genre, but as a cultural technology for survival—an expressive system through which individuals claimed voice in a society still structured by racial inequality.

This part frames Black music in the Americas not as imitation, but as cultural survival under pressure - a continuation of African systems reshaped by new realities.

This section establishes Africa as the first “music conservatory” and introduces the musical systems, instruments, and philosophies that would later travel across the Atlantic and shape the music of the African diaspora.

Plunky & Oneness strike out in surprising new directions, taking their progressive jazz-funk sensibilities into the dance club environment with a deep house and other remixes of their “I’ll Be There” single. Music critics have hailed legendary saxophonist-vocalist James “Plunky” Branch as a vanguard of Afro-centric jazz – curating a myriad of musical forms from funk and R&B to house and go-go into a progressive message of empowerment, positivity, and cultural awareness. Plu