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James Reese Europe
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James Reese Europe (22 February, 1881 – 9 May, 1919) was an American ragtime and early jazz bandleader, arranger, and composer. He was the leading figure on the African American music scene of New York City in the 1910s. Europe was born in Mobile, Alabama. His family moved to Washington, D.C. when he was 10 years old.
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James Reese Europe (22 February, 1881 – 9 May, 1919) was an American ragtime and early jazz bandleader, arranger, and composer. He was the leading figure on the African American music scene of New York City in the 1910s. Europe was born in Mobile, Alabama. His family moved to Washington, D.C. when he was 10 years old. He moved to New York in 1904.
In 1910 Reese organized the Clef Club, a society for African Americans in the music industry. In 1912, they made history when they played a concert at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of the Colored Music Settlement School. The Clef Club Orchestra while not a jazz band, was the first band to play proto-jazz at Carnegie Hall. It is difficult to overstate the importance of that event in the history of jazz in the United States — it was 12 years before the Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin concert at Aeolian Hall, and 26 years before Benny Goodman's famed concert at Carnegie Hall. Reese's orchestra also included Will Marion Cook, who had not been in Carnegie Hall since his own performance as solo violinist in 1896. Cook was the first black composer to launch full musical productions, fully scored with a cast and story every bit as classical as any Victor Hugo operetta. In the words of Gunther Schuller, Reese "...had 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." In other words, Europe provides a case as the very first example of jazz as a blues-based departure from ragtime.
His "Society Orchestra" became nationally famous in 1912, accompanying theater headliner dancers Vernon Castle and Irene Castle. Irene and Vernon taught America a new way of dancing; they were responsible for introducing and popularizing the "fox trot" — "America learned to dance from the waist down." In 1913 and 1914 he made a series of phonograph records for the Victor Talking Machine Company. These recordings are some of the best examples of the pre-jazz hot ragtime style of the U.S. Northeast of the 1910s. These are some of the most accepted quotes that are in place to protect the idea that the "Original Dixieland Jass Band" recorded the first jass (spelling later changed) pieces in 1917 for the Victor record company. Victor recorded Europe's Society Orchestra in 1913; unlike Europe's post-War recordings, the Victor recordings were not called nor marketed as "jazz" at the time, and were far from the first recordings of ragtime by African-American musicians.
Neither the Clef Club Orchestra nor the Society Orchestra were small "Dixeland" style bands. They were large symphonic bands to satisfy the tastes of a public that was used to performances by the likes of the John Phillip Sousa band and similar organizations very popular at the time. The Clef Orchestra had 125 members and played on various occasions between 1912 and 1915 in Carnegie Hall. It is instructive to read a comment from a music review in the New York Times from March 12, 1914: "...the programme consisted largely of plantation melodies and spirituals ...[arranged such as to show that]...these composers are beginning to develop an art of their own based on their folk material..."
It must not be forgotten that James Reese Europe had a different task and set of rules in front of him as an African-American, rules that had to be much different for those of the Original Dixieland Jass band. He was making black music and black people respectable to upper class whites who in the north were much more contemporary and cosmopolitan than those in the southern states in the pre-World War I era.
During World War I Europe obtained a Commission in the New York Army National Guard, where he saw combat as a lieutenant with the 369th Infantry Regiment (the "Harlem Hellfighters"), the band of which he directed to great acclaim. In February and March 1918, James Reese Europe and his military band travelled over 2,000 miles in France, performing for British, French and American military audiences as well as French civilians. Europe's "Hellfighters" also made their first recordings in France for the Pathé brothers. The first concert included a French march, and the Stars and Stripes Forever as well as syncopated numbers such as "The Memphis Blues", which, according to a later description of the concert by a band member "...started ragtimitis in France".
Buddy Bolden (sometimes called in retrospect the first jazz musician) had already stopped playing by 1906. Buddy said that what he was doing was "ragging" the melody[whoever wrote this is wrong - there are no recorded itnerviews with Bolden]. Scott Joplin wrote many of his rags in rondo form, but ragtime had become somewhat passé by 1917, the year its greatest composer, Scott Joplin died. The "blues" had replaced ragtime as the new craze adopted from black composers like W.C. Handy, whose "St. Louis Blues" hit close to 1914, and when Handy performed in France, the popular belief there was that it was the American national anthem. The "Jazz Age" was afoot and Europe's Society Orchestra was poised to lead the way
The band returned to the United States in February 1919. That year he made more recordings for Pathé Records. These include both instrumentals and accompanyments with vocalist Noble Sissle, who would later have great success with Eubie Blake with their 1921 production of Shuffle Along, which gives us the classic song "I'm Just Wild About Harry". The style is significantly changed from Europe's recordings of a few years earlier, incorporating blues, blue notes, and early jazz influence (including a rather stiff cover record of the Original Dixieland Jass Band's "Clarinet Marmalade"). There is no doubt that while James Reese Europe was overseas in "No Man's Land" during WW1, the development of Europe's music fell slightly behind some of the advances being made at home.
There is a popular and wrong perception that jazz left New Orleans in 1917 when the US Navy put the Storyville section of the city off-limits, thus putting the many musicians who played in those establishments out of work and, thus, causing a great "diaspora" of those who would then spread jazz music throughout the rest of the United States. That view is, is an incorrect oversimplification. New Orleans musicians such as the Original Creole Orchestra were already in New York years earlier. The syncopations and unique melodic concepts ("blue notes", etc.) of jazz were present in many other places -- including New York City -- quite a few years earlier.
It is difficult to fathom trying to pinpoint the origins of jazz, although it might be simplified if observed as the state of African music in North America, thus a classical music. As Rashaan Roland Kirk would say, "Black Classical Music with its origins in slavery. A music that is composite within the human experience, as unique as the French, Italian or German schools of music." James Reese Europe recorded the proto-jazz records in 1913-14. He and W.C. Handy were certainly the first black musician to record this proto jazz.
James Reese Europe died in 1919 after being stabbed in the neck by a member of his band after a dispute between the two of them. At the time of his death, he was the best-known African American bandleader in the United States. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
See also
External links
- Article with images
- Article and audio of the 1913–1914 recordings on redhotjazz.com
- Article and audio of the 1919 recordings on redhotjazz.com
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