Ray Charles Robinson — known to the world simply as Ray Charles — was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and composer who synthesized gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, country, and jazz into something that didn’t have a name until he made it. Blind from the age of seven, he learned to play piano by ear and went on to record some of the most emotionally direct music in American history. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and an entry in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He didn’t just play jazz. He lived inside music the way other people live inside a skin.

Jazz was born from African American experience in the early 20th century and has since influenced music traditions across the world, from New Orleans to Paris to Tokyo to Cape Town. Ray Charles understood it wasn’t a genre — it was a philosophy. Improvisation as a way of thinking. Dissonance resolved into something beautiful. Call and response as conversation. A jazz performance is democracy in sound: individuals expressing themselves fully while listening deeply to everyone else. On International Jazz Day, Charles’s definition is less a description of music than a description of how to be human.