Harlem Hellfighter: A Conversation with Jason Moran on James Reese Europe (Part One)

The passage of time can leave the legacy of important figures underrecognized. For every figure like Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, or John Coltrane who remains indelibly etched in our collective consciousness, dozens more have furthered the music in significant ways yet too often remain overlooked in the history books. One great example can be found in the subject of Jason Moran’s From the Dancehall to the Battlefield (Yes, 2023): James Reese Europe.

Born only a decade and a half after the end of the Civil War, Europe brought African-American music to new creative heights and expanded audiences. In 1910, Europe formed the Clef Club, the first union for Black American musicians. Two years later, he led the Clef Club’s 125-member orchestra to Carnegie Hall. In Europe’s own words, the programming of entirely Black penned compositions aimed to offer “to New Yorkers, for the first time, an opportunity of hearing what the colored people have already accomplished in music, and to prove the value of recognizing the native talent and encouraging the influence of music in the life and development of this people.” As Gunther Schuller would later write regarding the event, “[Europe] stormed the bastion of the white establishment and made many members of New York’s cultural elite aware of Negro music for the first time.” Musically the orchestra combined complex melodies and arrangements with driving rhythm, an evolutionary step from the ragtime of Scott Joplin to the music of “Livery Stable Blues.” 

A fact often overlooked in discussions of the Clef Club Orchestra’s 1912 performance at Carnegie Hall is that the event was intended to raise funds for the Music School Settlement for Colored People, an institution dedicated to “the preservation, encouragement, and development along natural lines of the music of the Negro, which is one of the most characteristic musical expressions in this country.” Support of this noble cause was in line with Europe’s character. While society pushed Black Americans to the sidelines, Europe was a vocal supporter of the preservation and growth of Black culture and Black consciousness. Europe’s ability to draw the attention of mostly white audiences to the treatment of Black Americans even led Eubie Blake to dub him the “Martin Luther King of music.” Europe was equally unwilling to bend to the musical conventions of a majority white society. Instead, he took pride in the Blackness of his music. As Europe later commented, “We colored people have our own music that is part of us. It’s the product of our souls; it’s been created by the sufferings and miseries of our race.”

By 1914, Europe began working with Vernon and Irene Castle, a husband and wife ballroom dancing team who undermined the prevailing narrative that dance was the work of the devil. With the Castles, Europe invented the turkey trot and the foxtrot. Europe also made a limited number of recordings during the mid-1910s. Europe became a household name to many, both Black and white. He easily could have stayed in New York to further his career but, instead, decided to enlist in the Army to fight in World War I. 

Europe was assigned to the 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment, more popularly known as the Harlem Hellfighters, and tasked by his commanding officer, Colonel William Hayward, to assemble a military band. Europe traveled far – even trekking to Puerto Rico – to find men for his unit. The Hellfighters entertained troops and were received with great enthusiasm. The audience response was so significant that a single concert in Paris turned into an eight-week residency, exposing most French listeners to Black American music for the first time, potentially spurring the great love of jazz in L’hexagone. Upon his return to America in 1919, Europe was hailed as a hero and began a tour with the Hellfighters band. Touring would be a short-lived effort as Europe would soon die at the hands of his band’s drummer, Herbert Wright. Europe was only thirty-eight years old. 

While Europe’s biography is a fascinating historical narrative, the question remains: what lessons can contemporary audiences learn from his experiences? This is where Moran’s From the Dancehall to the Battlefield is a particularly poignant contribution to the narrative. Moran has collaborated with several masters of the music in his own time – Archie Shepp, Henry Threadgill, Sam Rivers, Randy Weston, and Muhal Richard Abrams, among them – with whom he has been ingrained in the heritage of Black American music in a way one cannot adequately obtain through book studies alone. Since 2011, he has served as Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center, a role which provides him the opportunity to defy conventions in programming a historically significant venue, in some ways parallel to Europe’s booking at Carnegie Hall. Musically, Moran has shown an interest in revisiting the works of ancestors to show their continued significance. This is particularly evident in his multimedia presentations – 2007’s IN MY MIND, inspired by Thelonious Monk’s 1959 Town Hall performance, and the Fats Waller Dance Party which explored the compositions of its namesake by tying them to twenty-first-century R&B, hip hop, and soul music. 

Moran’s James Reese Europe project can be viewed as the third in a trilogy of these works. Like its predecessors – and Europe’s work itself – it is not penned into a particular sound or aesthetic idea. From the Dancehall presents an incredibly persuasive thesis that ties the proto-jazz of Europe to the avant-garde world of Albert Ayler, the diverse works of Geri Allen, and even Moran’s own experiments with “DRIP” filters. The album’s time hopping between antiquity and modernity is equally compelling and mysterious. It is one of Moran’s best to date. In the first part of our conversation with Moran, we discuss the significance of James Reese Europe and the origins of the pianist’s project dedicated to him. In the second half, we dive deeper into the album itself and the compositions it highlights.

PostGenre: From the Dancehall to the Battlefield is an incredibly special recording. It seems the deeper you dig into the work, the more layers that get exposed about both James Reese Europe specifically and the lineage of Black American composers, more generally. You first learned about James Reese Europe from Randy Weston, correct?

Jason Moran: That’s right.

PG: Weston was also working on a James Reese Europe project before he passed. Do you feel his project influenced this album?

JM: Oh, it was a one-to-one influence. [laughing]. About a year before he passed, we brought Randy to the Kennedy Center to perform his James Reese Europe project. Randy was one of the people trying to get James Reese Europe’s name out there and to play his music. It was much the same way Geri Allen did for Mary Lou Williams and Errol Garner at the end of her life. Geri pointed to both as a very important part of the legacy she inherited, and Randy was big on those ideas as well because he was a seminal pan-Africanist. He was always centered on Africa in terms of the language he used, how he played rhythms at the piano, how he touched the bottom octaves; really, everything about him.

Randy and I spent hours and hours together sharing information. And he shared the story of James Reese Europe with me. I know he shared it with many other people, but I’m glad he shared it with me because, at that time, I didn’t necessarily think about how I was going to strike out to make a project like this. But I also knew that this is the kind of thing that helps keep the history together. When someone passes you the rope, you can keep weaving it. But at some point, you ultimately have to pass that rope to someone else.

PG: But, of course, the mere fact Randy Weston was interested in James Reese Europe did not necessarily mean you would share that interest. What was it that first attracted you to James Reese Europe’s story?

JM: I was first drawn to James Reese Europe by how Randy Weston spoke about him. Randy knew a lot of stuff about the world. But there was a gravity in how he spoke about James Reese Europe. And at the end of our conversation, he gave me a 369th infantry hat. Randy wanted me to know about James Reese Europe’s story, and, sure enough, he was right; James Reese Europe deserved more amplitude.

I also love hearing about people who don’t have a lot of recordings. So much of music – especially jazz – is documented by being recorded. The recorded history lets us treasure the music in a way different than how someone would treasure Beethoven. I think there is something interesting about people who don’t have much of a recording history. Herbie Nichols made only three records. Piano player Hasaan Ibn Al had only one real record, though they just released a second. James Reese Europe was at the dawn of recording technology and has only one full record and some singles. That lack of recorded history makes his music not as easily accessible, which means you have to go looking for it. You won’t stumble upon thirty records. Scarcity makes his music more powerful to me.

PG: Did you find the limited recorded history freeing or more restrictive when it came to putting together the project?

JM: Well, the good thing about the recordings James Reese Europe did make is that none have piano parts. Even though he played piano, you don’t really hear the piano voice on the recordings. So, I already knew I was taking a large leap by not only having a much smaller ensemble but also adding the piano to it. And those aspects freed me up a bit more creatively compared to other projects I have worked on. In my works dedicated to Fats Waller and Thelonious Monk, the piano was very present. It was central. 

With this [project], it’s more the idea and the ensemble that becomes the voice than the piano. It also became about what kinds of stories the songs were telling and whether I could find a way that I felt unearthed not only the layers of complexity that [people in the Harlem Hellfighters] were dealing with as performers in that era but also the complexities a band deals with in the twenty-first century and the parallels between the two.

PG: That past and present also tie into the masters of the music you have worked with during your career. Many of them – Archie Shepp being a great example – are, like James Reese Europe, also civil rights figures. Do you have any thoughts on how working with these musicians may have shaped your perspective on James Reese Europe?

JM: Those musicians have taught me a lot. Half of my study on historical subjects comes from working and talking to people like Archie off the bandstand. I learn a lot from hearing what they have to say about what they experienced and why they made the decisions they made. And it makes you put things into a larger context. It makes you examine things like how the AACM deals with collectivity compared to how the Clef Club addressed those issues back in 1910. Or what it means to say that you have a canon and declare that as musicians- Black musicians – in a country where your culture could have been stripped away and left in the ocean. People are still trying to figure those things out.

There is something about what James Reese Europe offered a large group of musicians in New York; the idea that they could work together and be safe to make music they could cherish. But they would have to fight for new places to play it. They would literally need to fight for it. I think that is something that other musicians, all the way up to today, understood about the music they want to play. Both Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor knew where the fight was. They wanted to figure out how the music they played amplified the fight. Even if it wasn’t always apparent on the stage, they represented the struggle and joy that lived in the communities that they represent. They understand their heritage.

I’ve been taught by only musicians who live that way, whether it was Jaki Byard, working with Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, or Andrew Hill and all the incredible things he did. Muhal Richard Abrams. Geri Allen. None of these people took heritage lightly. I wear it as a badge of honor to be a part of that heritage.

Thelonious Monk did too. He did not just play hymns that he learned as a piano pianist for a faith healer. He knows that the songs represent emancipation of the mind for many people who need not only the spirit to save them. His choice of songs and rhythms do that. So when he jumps from the piano, it’s not some show. It’s an elaborate liberatory movement to define his body in space on the stage. That’s also true when the band knows they’re sounding good. The moment is one in which the collective body becomes, at that moment, the embodiment of all that could possibly be free. It is beautiful. That’s the way I have always listened to jazz.

PG: In terms of connecting the past to the present, in Ken Burn’s Jazz, Wynton Marsalis notes that one thing that made James Reese Europe so great was that he was always trying to synthesize elements around him that seemed to disagree. That idea of combining different sounds and ideas seems to have guided jazz for the century since his death.

JM: Yeah, especially for his era – the vaudeville era – where there’s a show of what Blackness is on the stage. He’s wrestling with where his music may sometimes work against him to fit these kinds of shows. He’s battling his inner self that is saying that playing these kinds of shows can’t work forever. But he is really at the end of that era of performers. Ten years later, no one is trying to do those types of shows.

The economic context in which James Reese Europe worked deserves its own investigation. And one consideration is what those parallels are today. I’m thinking about how popular James Reese Europe was in his time – he was the Kendrick Lamar of his era – and how he dealt with an entertainment structure that could be a different kind of imprisonment. That conversation has not gone away because the stage can still be a very volatile place for identity. Fortunately, I’ve been around musicians who really try to find a way to create a safe space on the stage for their identity and to encourage others to find theirs too. But it’s not always that way, and I think James Reese Europe tried to wrestle himself out of some of those situations. 

PG: As another possible example of how issues continue to resonate is the continued debates over the term “jazz” itself. James Reese Europe once stated that “Jazz may be American music, but it is African American Music.” Even today, we have people who try to minimize the importance of the ties of jazz to Black heritage. And, on the other end, we have people like Nicholas Payton who avoid the term “jazz” entirely in favor of “Black American Music.” After a century, people are still trying to contextualize jazz and the language used to describe it.

JM: That is why history is important. History is supposed to allow us to learn from the mistakes of the past. But, unfortunately, people die. Their lessons sometimes get lost, and other people feel like they need to start over with a new kind of ignorance. But I will say that people worked very hard to get us to the place we are today.

I want to acknowledge that kind of language also. You just gave a quote from James Reese Europe. You didn’t provide some abstract melodic idea he created. You read a quote from something he wrote in an article or said in an interview. His words were very specific. He’s not dealing with any kind of abstraction in that way. He’s looking for something very real. That, to me, is also a very rare thing that I would say over time, was taken away from musicians. There’s something about the way he talks about canon, taking pride in it, and wanting to make more space for it. 

I think that ties into one of the reasons he gets kind of wiped away from common discussions on Black Music history or jazz history. If you start talking about James Reese Europe, you have to start discussing his activist model and what he stood for because those views were so central to the era in which he was performing. 

He becomes the model that Duke Ellington needs to see. There is this incredible photograph of Duke Ellington standing at James Reese Europe’s grave with a wreath. Ellington is maybe 33 at the time; in his prime. Here is the most famous big band musician at the time standing at a grave showing respect to James Reese Europe. But we don’t see that lineage discussed much. That’s partly because of how both progressive and aggressive James Reese Europe was as a musician. You don’t get to where he was by being easy to work with. And You also don’t get stabbed in the neck by stepping aside. Instead, he had this incredible belief that the music will continue to save people up until the end and stood for what he believed in.

PG: You mentioned his stabbing. He ended up bleeding to death when he was only 38 years old. Do you feel the brevity of his life also contributed to Europe’s not being better known by most people?

JM: His death was a tragedy. But I feel like people know his work, just not necessarily his name. He was part of a collective through which his work has continued. It just didn’t necessarily have his name stamped on it. He’s kind of like one of those Japanese Potters. For centuries, Japanese Potters would not stamp their names on things. They thought the most important thing was to make great work that could be handed down, not to get credit for what they have done. 

James Reese Europe also fits in with a group of thinkers – people like Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, or Zora Neale Hurston – who are trying to document where the people are, what they sound like, and how they talk to one another. They’re using any kind of mechanism to get that story out there. Of course, James Reese Europe also becomes one of the big thinkers that leads to the Harlem Renaissance. He was like this jolt in the ocean that pushed this wave forward.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Houston, where I never depended on the school to teach me about Blackness. But my parents were part of the movement. Their library was full of books on Blackness. They even had Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers come and give a lecture at our home. But many people don’t live in spaces like that. So, the challenge is getting that information to people. Part of even sharing James Reese Europe’s story and playing his music is to not only share that information but to have other people start to write his history too. Next month Branford Marsalis is also playing a concert of James Reese Europe’s music. I’m hoping that is a thing that begins to pique the interest of other musicians and other historians and that his story gets pulled back up to the surface. These are parts of our history that I think right now we take for granted. These are the kinds of things that artists did a hundred years ago to ensure a kind of safety that I can feel as a musician in 2023. 

PG: And it seems many details, if people even do talk about musicians from the past, often get lost over the years. For instance, you mentioned in another interview that for many of the musicians who went to France with Europe, it was the first time someone in their family had crossed the Atlantic since their ancestors came over on slave ships. That fact puts an even greater weight on what they were doing by traveling there.

JM: Yeah, we have to put their story in the ancestral timeline. And placing it in that context shows the trust these soldiers had in James Reese Europe. 

Even the Puerto Rican musicians in his group trusted him, though he didn’t speak a single word of Spanish. All of the band members greatly trusted him to lead them into something that would showcase not only their bravery but also their musicianship. And they trusted him to bring them safely back to their families. There is a lot of trust going on. 

Noble Sissle [ed. Sissle served as a sergeant and lead vocalist in the New York 369th Infantry and became the civilian band’s leader upon Europe’s death] wrote a memoir if Europe. It is an incredible document that lives in the Library of Congress. It is only about a hundred pages. In it, he talks about the group being on the boat and going across the ocean. And that alludes to how softly they would have to play in the bottom of the boat with this low blue light. This is before they even make landfall, and it is not Carnegie Hall they’re playing in; it is the hull of a ship. There is a lot more about that journey that deserves further research. People need to look further into what the soldiers and musicians were up against as performers. Yes, as performers but mostly as US citizens. I think they were trying to showcase something to America that America had not seen so prominently yet.

Stay tuned for Part Two of our conversation with Moran, where we go on a deeper dive into the compositions on From the Dancehall to the Battlefield.

From the Dancehall to the Battlefield is now available on Bandcamp. More information on Jason Moran can be found on his website.