Crude and bungled musical nationalism of the kind we ought to have seen the back of years ago. Nobody's music is purely an autonomous development, despite what the Orban fanboys in the Hungarian folk scene and the Jacobite-fascist throwbacks with knotwork tattoos you get in Scotland might think.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops made a great start in showing how African-Americans made creative use of Scottish material and made it their own. Anybody who looks AT ALL at early jazz can see how it builds on a sophisticated understanding of European musical idioms as much as it incorporates African ideas. This museim's line is basically a dressed up version of "natural sense of rhythm" stereotypes and it's grossly condescending to people like Armstrong who had a comprehensive view of music and the intellectual equipment to weave startlingly unrelated ideas together. The implicit message a lot of people are going to take away from this effort is that African-Americans are too stupid to understand anybody else's culture. It's totally counterproductive.