In Opinion: History and music collide — and James Reese Europe leads the band. Meet the most important Black musician and military leader you’ve never heard of.
Let us now praise James Reese Europe. Who? you say. The first African American officer to enter battle in World War I and a member of the highly decorated 369th Infantry Regiment. The hottest bandleader of his time. The founder of the first Black labor union. The composer, arranger and music industry visionary that ragtime legend Eubie Blake called “the Martin Luther King of music.” The musical forebear hailed by present-day jazz great Jason Moran as "the Big Bang" of jazz.
For Moran, what’s “Big Bang” about Europe was how he put 125 Clef Club musicians on stage at a historic 1912 Carnegie Hall concert, and his confidence in the depth, complexity and excellence of Black music. In an interview on the SFJAZZ website, Moran said, “He’s what leads to the big band era of the '20s. He shows that you can have a big band, and you can play entirely Black music, and you can do it entirely with Black musicians. It’s like, ‘We don’t have to be imitating Europeans.
A leading musicologist specializing in African American music, Tammy Kernodle, PhD of Miami University in Ohio, is also my Danville, Va. homegirl. When I called to ask her about Europe, she said I’d caught her writing a script for a Europe project she was working on with jazz great Branford Marsalis. Her big laugh rolled out of the phone. “You are right on target! James Reese Europe talked about how Black music comes from the soul and the soil.
Europe enlisted to fight but the Army commissioned him to recruit and build a military band to attract more Black soldiers. Despite the racism of the American military, the 369th became one of the most decorated units in the war. Overseas audiences raved at the budding of jazz — a jaunty freedom, little breaks in the march tunes — they heard in Europe's military band. Over there, this sound by Black soldier-musicians, was hailed as American.
It was a particularly terrible time to lose a leader who was respected and admired by Blacks and whites. The Red Summer of 1919 had begun, a series of violent conflicts between white immigrants and Blacks migrating from the rural South to cities in the North and Midwest and between white Southerners intent on “keeping down” Blacks who had returned from the war with expectations that they should have the freedom they had helped their country secure for whites overseas.
One by one, the Black men performing on stage set their instruments aside and stood around the piano, heads bowed and hands joined as if they were gathered around a grave. Moran stood up, joined his left hand to the circle, played a few more notes with his right hand, then joined his bandmate’s grasp. The music stopped but the images kept playing for a few moments.
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