Europe, James Reese

Source:

 African American National Biography

Europe, James Reese

(22 Feb. 1880–9 May 1919),

music administrator, conductor, and composer, was born in Mobile, Alabama, the son of Henry J. Europe, an Internal Revenue Service employee and Baptist minister, and Lorraine Saxon. Following the loss of his position with the Port of Mobile at the end of the Reconstruction, Europe's father moved his family to Washington, D.C., in 1890 to accept a position with the U.S. Postal Service. Both of Europe's parents were musical, as were some of his siblings. Europe attended the elite M Street High School for blacks and studied violin, piano, and composition with Enrico Hurlei of the U.S. Marine Corps band and with Joseph Douglass, the grandson of Frederick Douglass.

Following the death of his father in 1900, Europe moved to New York City. There he became associated with many of the leading figures in black musical theater, which was then emerging from the tradition of nineteenth-century minstrelsy. Over the next six years, Europe established himself as a composer of popular songs and instrumental pieces and as the musical director for a number of major productions, including Ernest Hogan's “Memphis Students” (1905), John Larkins's A Trip to Africa (1904), Bob Cole and John Rosamond Johnson's Shoo-Fly Regiment (1906–1907) and Red Moon (1908–1909), S. H. Dudley's Black Politician (1907–1908), and Bert Williams's Mr. Load of Koal (1909). During Red Moon's run, he was involved with, but did not marry, a dancer in the company, Bessie Simms, with whom he had a child.

James Reese Europe, the regimental bandleader with the Fifteenth “Hellfighters” Infantry Regiment, brought live ragtime, blues, and jazz to Europe during World War I. (National Archives.)

view larger image

In April 1910 Europe became the principal organizer and first president of the Clef Club of New York, the first truly effective black musicians' union and booking agency in the city. So effectual was the club during the years before World War I that, as James Weldon Johnson recalls in his memoir Black Manhattan (1930), club members held a “monopoly of the business of entertaining private parties and furnishing music for the dance craze which was then beginning to sweep the country.” Europe was also appointed conductor of the Clef Club's large orchestra, which he envisioned as a vehicle for presenting the full range of African American musical expression, from spirituals to popular music to concert works. On 27 May 1910 he directed the one-hundred-member orchestra in its first concert at the Manhattan Casino in Harlem. Two years later, on 2 May 1912, Europe brought 125 singers and instrumentalists to Carnegie Hall for an historic “Symphony of Negro Music,” featuring compositions by Will Marion Cook, Harry Burleigh, John Rosamond Johnson, William Tyers, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and himself. It was the first performance ever given by a black orchestra at the famous “bastion of white musical establishment,” and Europe returned to direct concerts there in 1913 and 1914.

In 1913 Europe married Willie Angrom Starke, a widow of some social standing within New York's black community; they had no children. Later that year, he and his fellow Clef Club member Ford Dabney became the musical directors for the legendary dance team of Vernon Castle and Irene Castle until the end of 1915 when Vernon Castle left to serve in World War I. Irene Castle recalls in her memoir Castles in the Air (1958) that they wanted Europe because his was the “most famous of the colored bands” and because he was a “skilled musician and one of the first to take jazz out of the saloons and make it respectable.” With the accompaniment of Europe's Society Orchestra, the Castles toured the country, operated a fashionable dance studio and supper club in New York City, and revolutionized American social dancing by promoting and popularizing the formerly objectionable “ragtime” dances, such as the turkey trot and the one-step. The most famous of the Castle dances, the fox-trot, was conceived by Europe and Vernon Castle after an initial suggestion by the composer W. C. Handy. As a result of his collaboration with the Castles, in the fall of 1913 Europe and his orchestra were offered a recording contract by Victor Records, the first ever offered to a black orchestra. Between December 1913 and October 1914 Europe and his Society Orchestra cut ten sides of dance music for Victor, eight of which were released.

In 1916 Europe enlisted in the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard, the first black regiment organized in the state and one of the first mobilized into federal service when the United States entered World War I in 1917. After encountering severe racial hostility while training in South Carolina, the infantry was sent directly to France and assigned to the French army. Europe, who held two assignments, bandmaster of the regiment's outstanding brass band and commander of a machine gun company, served at the front for four months and was the first black American officer to lead troops in combat in the Great War. The entire Fifteenth Regiment, which was given the nickname “Hellfighters,” emerged after the Allied victory in November of 1918 as one of the most highly decorated American units of the war. Europe's band, which performed throughout France during the war, was the most celebrated in the American Expeditionary Force and is credited with introducing European audiences to the live sound of orchestrated American ragtime, blues, and a new genre called “jazz.”

On 17 February 1919 the regiment and its band were given a triumphant welcome-home parade up Fifth Avenue, and Lieutenant Europe, hailed as America's “jazz king,” was signed to a second recording contract; he and the band subsequently embarked upon an extensive national tour. Europe's career ended abruptly and tragically a few months later, however, when during the intermission of one of the band's concerts in Boston, he was fatally stabbed by an emotionally disturbed band member. Following a public funeral in New York City, the first ever for a black American, Europe was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

Europe composed no major concert works, but many of his more than one hundred songs, rags, waltzes, and marches exhibit unusual lyricism and rhythmic sophistication. His major contributions, however, derive from his achievements as an organizer of professional musicians, a skilled and imaginative conductor and arranger, and an early and articulate champion of African American music. Through his influence on Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, and George Gershwin, among others, Europe helped to shape the future of American musical theater. As a pioneer in the creation and diffusion of orchestral jazz, he initiated the line of musical development that led from Fletcher Henderson and Paul Whiteman to Duke Ellington. Without the expanded opportunities for black musicians and for African American music that Europe helped to inaugurate, much of the development of American music in the 1920s, and indeed since then, would be inconceivable.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

processed xml | source xml