The composer’s How Black Music Took Over the World charts the spread of African rhythms around the globe and across musical genres.

You trace the Charleston, a 1920s dance, back to an 18th-century slave revolt in South Carolina. How did that happen?

It began as an adaptation to a very dehumanizing situation. After the Stono slave rebellion of 1739, South Carolina banned Blacks from owning drums because they supposedly might be used to pass signals. So people had to figure out other ways of creating rhythm. Among the African American Gullah-Geechee community in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, that led to unique forms of movement brought over from Africa, which they extended into a dance style. They would clap their hands, slap their arms and legs—the same moves you’d see white flappers making when they danced the Charleston. My parents came from that region, and when people like them came up the East Coast to New York City, this kind of dancing bled out of the Black community and became a national craze.

You write about playing in the drum section of the samba group Olodum during a Carnival parade in Brazil. What was that like?

Oceanic. You’re right there in the street, part of this thing moving through the city, like the city is the ocean and you’re swimming in it. And the sound of the combination of all these drums—as a musician, you’re hearing everything directly, but then you’re hearing all the different time scales as the immersive sound is bouncing off the street. And for the spectators, everything is coming toward you and then it’s receding, so you get this cinematic musical experience. You can go see a symphony orchestra, it’s a grand experience, but the drum orchestra is a community experience.

The book explores how white musicians appropriate Black music, including how bluegrass bands appropriated the banjo, originally a Black instrument. When is appropriation legitimate and when isn’t it?

Bluegrass reflects the Scottish and Irish heritage of Appalachia. But how did the banjo get there? One of my bands, Harriet Tubman, did a project with Irish musicians a few years ago. My main takeaway was that the rhythms in bluegrass music are not the same rhythms in Irish music. So where did they come from? There are paintings of 18th-century Black musicians, and they’re playing fiddles and banjos. Those are now the stereotypical instruments of bluegrass. It’s undeniable that there’s African American DNA in that music. An appropriation is illegitimate when you don’t honor that, when you write out one side of the story.