The Danger of Oversimplifying Black Music

There’s a persistent problem when people try to trace all of Black culture back to one set of roots: it flattens centuries of history into a single, digestible narrative. Bobby Hemmitt’s recent video on jazz illustrates this perfectly. He attempts to link early jazz, swing, and even Vodou practices to the gods of Kemet. On the surface, it sounds profound. But history and nuance tell a different story.

Let’s start with the music itself. Jazz emerged from New Orleans, a city alive with Christian hymns, African rhythms, Creole culture, and improvisational spirit. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, both iconic figures, were steeped in gospel traditions. The early jazz they created was grounded in lived experience: spiritual, cultural, and community-driven. It wasn’t a literal echo of Kemet, and it wasn’t “screaming for the white man.” That’s a distortion that erases the agency, artistry, and intention behind their work.

Then there’s the matter of “jump jazz.” Hemmitt keeps using the term, but it’s historically inaccurate. What he’s really pointing to is jump blues or jump jive, a post-swing style that emerged in the 1940s. Swing—big bands led by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway was already making jazz danceable. Jump blues shrank the bands, amped up the rhythm, and added playful, high-energy vocals. Louis Jordan’s Tympany Five is the classic example: music designed to make you move. In New Orleans vernacular, “jump” also refers to buck jumping—the kinetic, high-energy style of brass band performance. Confusing the two misrepresents the evolution of jazz and the social context in which it lived.

Cultural and religious syncretism is also at play. Vodou in America incorporated Catholicism due to colonization. That’s how Hoodoo developed. But Vodou is not Kemet. Linking them as if they share the same origin conflates separate histories and erases their unique paths. The fertility god Hemmitt invokes might be from Kemet, but that has nothing to do with the Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices that influenced jazz musicians’ communities.

The reality is, jazz is more than myth, more than ancestry, more than symbolic lineage. It’s a scientific, neurological experience. Music changes mood, stimulates parts of the brain, triggers emotion. Think of the Dies Irae in movies, or the iconic moment when Mufasa dies in The Lion King. The grief lands not only because of the story—but because of the music itself. Jazz, in its improvisational and gospel-infused form, was built to evoke, to move, to disrupt and delight simultaneously. That’s its power.

Oversimplifying it into “all Black culture traces directly to Kemet” does a disservice, not just to jazz, but to Black history itself. These traditions are rich, layered, and distinct. They intersect in ways that are fascinating, not monolithic. Understanding the evolution from gospel → New Orleans jazz → swing → jump blues → R&B is not just academic—it’s essential. It preserves the agency and innovation of the artists, the resilience of the communities, and the science behind why this music still moves us today.

Black culture cannot be reduced to a single narrative, and jazz cannot be flattened into myth. It’s alive, complex, and unapologetically rooted in the people who made it, in the cities that birthed it, and in the rhythms that refuse to be silenced.