Looking at the history of Western music, certain individuals stand out as musical geniuses: Mozart, Bach. We recognize this phenomenon and marvel at it. These individuals transformed the music.
So among the 4 to 10 million African-Americans, doesn’t it stand to reason that a musical phenomenon of some sort would spring forth? And doesn’t it stand to reason that such a genius would work with the music at hand, which might be Western music or music indigenous to Black culture? If so, can we recognize Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Robert Johnson, and others as geniuses who transformed American music? Are they lesser lights because they wrote and/or played non-Western music, a music that came out ot the amalgam of Western music and African?