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

We continue our conversation with Jason Moran by going deeper into the songs on his James Reese Europe inspired album, From the Dancehall to the Battlefield (Yes, 2023). These discussions lead us through WC Handy, Albert Ayler, Geri Allen, and student musicians at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. We also uncover the meditative aspects of music, the power of a musical rallying call, the relationship between modern jazz and dancing, and the opportunity to find freedom away from home.

You can read the first part of our conversation with Moran here.

PostGenre: In terms of research, what is your process for creating a project like this one, the Fats Waller Dance Party, or your tribute to Monk?

Jason Moran: The first thing is to listen to the artist’s music with which I’m familiar. Then I look for, especially with this project, songs I don’t know. There is a published book of James Reese Europe songs that has, maybe, sixty pieces of music in it. They’re not all recorded, so you really have to go through them and play through them. After digging deeper into their music, I start to hear the musician’s ideas in other pieces. I can hear things in my music that come from Thelonious Monk or Geri Allen because I’m playing with a more contemporary touch. And you can hear James Reese Europe in their music and others as well. The other part of my research is talking to people. When I’m in research mode, I talk a lot to a lot of people. I just see what comes back from those conversations.

I even go on eBay once a week to see what comes up about James Reese Europe, the 369th Infantry, or the Harlem Hellfighters. Stuff that people have in their homes start to surface as people sell them online.

But the most significant parts are listening and reading. It is incredibly important to find people who have stories. And then I look, especially for a stage performance, for an aesthetic that helps tell the story. In our stage performance [of the James Reese Europe project], we have a film that goes along with it. It is shot by a great cinematographer, Bradford Young, and it showcases us basically in a meditation. We consider this record, From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, to also be a kind of meditation.

PG: Pauline Oliveros’ composition “Zena’s Circle” certainly fits the meditative mindset. What was it about this particular piece that you felt fit with the album?

JM: Well, Pauline was also a fellow Houstonian. When I started working at the Park Avenue Armory, I invited Pauline to give my band and around fifteen other people a deep listening weekend retreat. “Zena’s Circle” was one of the exercises she showed us. Our experience with her was so profound that I started to use the piece when teaching other musicians about response time and the idea of being one breath together. When we started working on this concept, I used Pauline’s exercise for the band to get in tune with one another. We held hands and got into that idea of sending the breath around in a circle. The thought is that if we have that relationship, and are listening to each other inhale and exhale, we’ll be okay. Pauline was a very special person, and she was an instrumental part of the process of breathing air back into these songs too.

PG: Oliveros is hardly the only more modern composer reflected on From the Dancehall to the Battlefield. James Reese Europe’s “Ballin’ the Jack” turns into Geri Allen’s “Feed the Fire” and the traditional “Flee as a Bird to your Mountain” morphs into Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts.” Did you initially set out to form these connections to more contemporary pieces, or were there cues you heard in the older songs that tied to those other songs?

JM: The notes came together in “Ballin’ the Jack” because it feels very much in line with Monk, and from there, with Geri Allen. To me, they all sit in the same musical space.

But the inclusion of “Ghosts” was a more pointed act. I read in Nobel Sissel’s memoir about the soldiers playing “Flee as a Bird to your Mountain.” I knew that in the 1960s, Albert Ayler had served in the armed forces in France. Ayler also played his own version of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” James Reese Europe also flipped people out when he did a revised version of “La Marseillaise”; the same song. I know Ayler was very well aware of James Reese Europe and both shared interests in ancestry and the spiritual realm.

Also, with a lot of those musicians who fight in a war and play in military bands, it changed their relationship to music in a way different than playing clubs on 52nd Street. That’s certainly the case with my teacher, Jacki Byard, with his service during World War Two. There is a special chemistry that I think those musicians had in their music. Both James Reese Europe and Albert Ayler have that in common as well. I thought it would be important to put his music together with “Flee as a Bird.” The combination of “Flee as a Bird” and “Ghosts” is one of my favorite moments in the show and on the record.

PG: Connecting the music of James Reese Europe and Albert Ayler is a fascinating idea. Ayler’s works are often identified with the avant-garde, and Europe was heavily involved in dance music. It seems over time a disconnect may have formed between jazz and dance. Did you combine the two songs partly to show that jazz and dance are not as far removed as most people may think?

JM: Exactly. Even when the music seemed a bit more removed from dance, I think people tried to find other ways to represent dance. Thelonious Monk standing at his piano, for instance, is a reflection on dance.

I recently heard from the historian Brett Edward Hayes that the “A.D.” in Julius Hemphill’s “Dogon A.D.” stands for “adapted dance”, which was a dance the Dogon tribe would do for tourists. It was an adapted dance because it was not necessarily the one they did for their ceremonies. This idea of adapted dance hits the stage so frequently that it is part of the complexities of concert music. Musicians often toil over who they make their music for – themselves? The audience? Both? These questions tie right into the concept of adapted dance.

PG: Another similarity between Europe and Ayler is that both lived short lives. Europe was 38 when he died and Ayler was 34. It seems there are many artists – Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Jimi Hendrix, and J Dilla, among them- who came in and revolutionized music and just…

JM: Didn’t stick around. Yeah. 

I don’t know if they had any premonitions earlier in their lives that told them their ends would be coming sooner than others. But I do know we’re thankful for what those people left behind. I think they got the work done that they needed to, and most of the rest of us needed time to digest it. It’s selfish to think about it that way, though it’s true.

But, in a way, everything comes from something. Roy Haynes is such an important figure in our music and, even he, in a way, ties back to James Reese Europe’s death. The Hellfighters band had twin brothers as drummer. One, Herbert Wright, was the man who killed – murdered, really- James Reese Europe. Wright went to jail but was ultimately released. When he got out of jail, he started teaching drum lessons in Roxbury, a prominent Black neighborhood in Boston. Roy Haynes was one of his first students.

PG: Wow.

JM: You never really know how these things in history are going to weave themselves back into our current story.

Actually, I think Roy Haynes learned that his teacher was the one who killed James Reese Europe when he watched the Jazz documentary by Ken Burns. [Roy’s son and gifted cornetist] Graham Haynes told me that story.

There are so many interesting stories out there like that which connect the present and James Reese Europe’s era. I keep learning more and more about him from other people. Even people I don’t know send me messages and tell me aspects of the history. The historical record is the evidence of James Reese Europe’s life, but his name continues to be brought back to the surface as people mention him and talk about him.

PG: Those connections to beyond music as well. For instance, Europe’s first music teacher was Frederick Douglass’ grandson, Joseph Douglass, drawing a line between Europe and the critically important abolitionist.

JM: That’s right. And it’s not expected that those direct lines would exist. But I think when you target culture, these types of surprises emerge. I say in the opening piece that:

“In 1881, James Reese Europe is born in Mobile, Alabama, and in the pre-dawn of the Great Migration, his parents moved up to Washington, D.C. because they knew.”

What I am insinuating is that they knew Alabama was going to be slow for a long time. So, they left with his siblings. I think James Reese Europe finding Joseph Douglass to teach him is a kind of liberatory act. Sometimes we think about how we can find liberation from reading a book, some physical activity, a spiritual practice, or practicing an instrument. You can find it there, but you also have to find the other codes out there, and, thank goodness, he did.

PG: In terms of moving to try to find liberation, it is also a fascinating aspect of James Reese Europe’s story that during the war the Harlem Hellfighters spent so much time in France. It would have been the first time for many in France to be exposed to Black American music, correct?

JM: Yes. Also, there is a visual aspect to what the band is doing. It is a large ensemble of men dressed up in uniform. These were Black men playing incredible music with impeccable technique and great precision. And they are fighting for the listener’s safety. A lot of layers in the performances people heard. Also a lot of humanity. And a lot of humility.

It was also the moment where the audience is hearing that syncopation that will always define Black music. They are hearing it, and it makes them feel better. Somehow they start to hear the early signs of jazz right there. Rhythms are getting looser, and melodies are starting to find one another and sneak around one another. Before – but not by much- Louis Armstrong is down in New Orleans playing second to King Oliver on a smaller scale, the same thing is happening in France on a much larger one. And people are fascinated by it.

PG: France has provided a place of escape for many American jazz musicians over the years. Dexter Gordon, Kenny Clarke, Lucky Thompson, Don Byas, and others moved to France, partly to avoid persecution. Do you think Europe’s time in France laid the cultural groundwork for them to do so?

JM: Yeah, but it is more than music. From Josephine Baker to James Baldwin. So many painters, like Beauford Delaney. It goes on and on and on for decades and generations. There is something about going to that soil that allows creative people to let loose.

You can also hear that aspect of French culture in the record [the Harlem Hellfighters] made when they returned home. Some of the songs are meant for Broadway shows. But when that band plays “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?” It sounds completely different from the version used in a musical. The band is restating who the narrator and subject are and unleashing a new power over the lyrics themselves. I mean, the song lyrics literally read:

“How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree’? How ya gonna keep ’em away from Broadway jazzin around and paintin’ the town? … They’ll never want to see a rake or plow and who the deuce can parleyvous a cow?”

It’s not abstract. The lyrics are very blunt; the plainest English. They can say they’ve been liberated. They have seen things that made them feel respected in France and were here to tell America what it felt like.

It reminds me of a story Wayne Shorter told me about playing with Art Blakey at Birdland. They had played Carnegie Hall and did a later performance at Birdland. At Birdland, the audience wouldn’t stop talking. Art Blakey could barely hear himself over people talking at the front table. So, he stood up from the drum set and said, “You all wouldn’t talk in Carnegie Hall.” He felt like at Carnegie Hall people would actually listen to him but at a place closer to home, he was given less respect. But that increased respect happens only if you leave some of the safe spaces that you’re in and actually go into the other territory.

PG: And it seems Europe was pushing for a larger group of Black musicians than just himself, or even his band, to have that kind of exposure. Noticeably, he performed not just his own compositions but the works of several other Black composers as well, particularly WC Handy. Actually, there are almost as many compositions by Handy on From the Dancehall to the Battlefield as there are by Europe.

JM: I also really like that about [James Reese Europe]. He became well known for songs that he wrote earlier in life or that he wrote for [Vernon and Irene Castle] for their dancing. But as he is going to war, he does not use those to entice people to join the band and to come fight. He uses Blues songs by WC Handy as rallying anthems. He used Handy’s songs to keep up the soldiers’ spirits. It was very clever of him to use the songs in that way.

And even back when he went to Carnegie Hall with the Clef Club, he wasn’t playing solely his own compositions. He wanted to acknowledge that there were other Black composers out there writing at his level. I’ve been calling him the D-Nice of his generation. He knows the songs that the audiences need to hear, and he’s hand-selecting the pieces of the arrangements. He’s tweaking the arrangements and amping them up. That’s what gives them their sense of flair. It’s also generosity on his part to say that he is part of a web of people, not a single composer. He acknowledges his part in the pantheon.

And some of his songs are just straight military band songs of that era. But he’s also making sure that they play them their own way. The 369th plays them in a specific way. They were establishing that part of the freedom in the music we inherit. They put their own phrasing into it. It’s the same thing Billie Holiday figures out and why she phrases the song so differently. She didn’t necessarily need to write it. But when she sang it, it was as if she wrote it.

PG: In addition to compositions by Europe, Handy, Ayler, and Allen, there are three of your own compositions on the album. You seem to use them to stretch that heritage line further musically.

JM: I love museums, but I don’t think they should exist on the stage. I have also been taught by people who found ways to really make the stage feel alive. People who make the music feel alive. I’m blessed to have been taught methods of doing that without apology. And I feel like it’s an honest way for me to look at some really brave souls that work in a way that I could never imagine. I want to show them as much honor as I possibly can to pick up for their efforts.

PG: One of your pieces is “Drop (Tear)” where you use the DRIP effect, something you showcased on The Sound Will Tell You (Yes, 2021). What was your inspiration for adding this effect to the track?

JM: The pandemic slowed everything down. But it also showed a real underside to a lot of my psychology that I was wrestling with at the piano. DRIP allowed the sound I was trying to make to have a longer shadow.

As far as how DRIP fits into this project, there was a way that the Hellfighters put the sounds of war onto their record. You can hear them mimicking the sound of bombs dropping on “On Patrol in No Man’s Land.” They also really make the snare drum sound like a machine gun. The band makes you feel like you are in the heat of battle with them. I was initially concerned about how I would reflect those sounds on [From the Dancehall to the Battlefield]. The use of the (Tear) sound on DRIP was an homage to how they made you feel like you were right on the front lines.

PG: Another original composition was the closer “For James,” which ends with the audience clapping and singing along to the melody. Did you include the audience to emphasize how Europe’s contributions continue to be felt in modern music?

JM: The other thing I want to share about his music was his students. At the very end, what you hear is The 369th Experience Band, which is a collection of kids from HBCU bands who come together to play James Reese Europe’s music.

In my speech that ended the track, I was telling the students that part of what was incredible about the musicians in the Harlem Hellfighters was how they played some of their music in the midst of total warfare. We were all playing together in a safe environment – a rehearsal room at the Kennedy Center. But the musicians working with James Reese Europe were far from safe. There’s a bit of urgency in some of those eighth notes. That urgency lives – regardless of whether you feel it all the time- in their music. I wanted to have a bit of a sonic homage to the terror that some of those soldiers must have felt by being in that aggressive of an environment.

PG: During live performances of the Harlem Hellfighters project, you and the rest of the band dress up in military garb.

JM: Yeah, we do.

PG: Is your dress also an homage to the soldiers or intended more to get into the mindset they may have had while playing the music?

JM: It’s both. My wife [multi-dimensional artist] Alicia [Hall Moran] and I were talking about what the group should wear on stage. She suggested that we should wear things that feel like they are gripping our bodies and not loosely flowing clothes. So, I wear these boots that go all the way up my calf to my knee. They are tight around my calves and are incredibly heavy. They are part armor and do not let you move much. We dress the way we do to be very aware of the way that kind of uniform tells your body to move.

PG: You are also a longtime resident of Harlem. Does visiting the music of the Hellfighters, since they were also based there, make you feel closer to Harlem?

JM: I consider this project on James Reese Europe as the third in a trilogy of Harlem piano. My Thelonious Monk project (In My Mind) focuses on his performance at Town Hall in 1959. Fats Waller innovated Harlem stride. And now the James Reese Europe project. I didn’t think about the three as a trilogy in the beginning, but I realized it later. I’ve lived in Harlem for almost thirty years now, and when you stay in any place that long, you end up trying to figure out your role in that community. Those musicians definitely are part of how I feel connected to Harlem.

PG: Besides Monk, Waller, and now Europe, are there any other historical figures that fascinate you and you would like to explore further?

JM: There are but then you would have to go back to the Nineteenth Century or even earlier. [laughing]. As soon as I think that I’m done with history, I always hear about someone else doing something more radical than ever.

There was a guy named Henry Box Brown who shipped his way to freedom. [In 1849,] he arranged to have himself shipped in a box from Virginia to abolitionists in Philadelphia. While he was in the box on his way to freedom, he sang a song in his head. When his box was opened, he sang the song out loud. Once he was free, he went out into the world and started doing stage shows on how he shipped himself to freedom.

I started writing an essay, which will never be public. It’s just for myself. But in it, I try to sort out the way John Coltrane plays his twenty-eight minute solo on “One Down, One Up” on his live album from the Half Note (Impulse!, 2005, capturing a March 25, 1965 performance) and the way Henry Box Brown is imagining sound for hours and days until he’s able to let it out. I like to think Trane was imagining sound when practicing at home and then let it out when he hit the bandstand. He lets it all out.

I also think about Trane in relation to that story that people love to tell about him asking Miles Davis how to take a shorter solo. Miles’ response was to take the horn out of his mouth. But Trane can’t do it. He decides that taking the horn out of his mouth is one way but not the way he will follow. That’s a soul that has to tell it all because they’re not promised another ten years. It goes back to your point earlier about people who lived at level ten. He becomes the proponent of this person who found a way to let it all out. Dedication to art in the way shown by Trane takes humility and the sacrifices of the artists’ families to make that kind of work is incredible.

Again, you can see this with the men who went to war alongside James Reese Europe because they heard the band play “Memphis Blues.” They are looking for something in life. And I think with that band, they found it. They may not have found it over and over again. The band didn’t tour for many years or make many recordings. But what they did in the war, and the record they made when they got home, my goodness, that is a band that is tight. When you hear that group, they are tight. And one thing that was revelatory for us as a band when we tried to play their music was how incredibly difficult the articulation was for the brass and reeds. That band was doing things that 95 to 97 percent of musicians today cannot play. And I’m not talking about style. I’m just talking about technique.

PG: Is it solely technique or is it also due to technology? Instruments have evolved over the last century to sound differently. For instance, back then, the C Melody saxophone was predominant, and now almost no one even makes them. So, it is natural to think some techniques may have been largely lost to history.

JM: That’s true, too. But it’s also the imagination of technique. There are parts that even with historically accurate instruments, most musicians today would be unable to play. So, there’s the instrumentation but that only gets you so far. It’s like you mentioned earlier about all the layers around the music. Once you dig underneath, oh my god, it just becomes more and more rich.

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