James Reece Europe, founder of Jazz and leader of men

Little is known in this country of James Reese Europe who died almost 100 years ago. Yet the world would be significantly different without his contribution to modern music, for it is fair to say he ensured that African American music was taken seriously as an art form specific to the experiences of Black Americans, a huge achievement at the height of the Jim Crow discrimination in the US. And without the influence of jazz, the blues and soul, modern music would have far less energy and rhythmic complexity.

Recognising Reece Europe's fight for the rightful place of black music, African-American composer Eubie Black described him as the "Martin Luther King of music".

James 'Jim' Reese Europe was born in Mobile, Alabama, to Henry and Laura Europe. His family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1890, when he was 10 years old. He moved to New York in 1904.

In 1910, he organised the Clef Club, a society for African Americans in the music industry. In 1912 the club made history when The Clef Club Orchestra was the first black group of musicians to play a concert at Carnegie Hall. Tellingly, it was staged for the benefit of the Colored Music Settlement School which provided musical education for Black children in New York who were excluded from other music schools.

The Clef Club Orchestra played a type of proto-jazz at this Carnegie Hall concert. The importance of this event and the success of the orchestra in launching Black inspired and performed music, cannot be overstated. It was 12 years before the Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin concert at Aeolian Hall which is often oddly regarded as the beginning of jazz since Whiteman and Gershwin were both white and both openly acknowledged their debt to black musicians and composers.

The Clef Club Orchestra played music only written by black composers, including Harry T. Burleigh and Samuel Coleridge Taylor, to predominantly white audiences. In the words of US music doyen Gunther Schuller: "Reece Europe stormed the bastion of the white establishment and made New York's cultural elite aware of Negro music for the first time", while the New York Times critic remarked presciently:

These composers are beginning to form an art of their own."

Reece Europe was outspoken in promoting this new music:

We have developed a kind of symphony music that, no matter what else you think, is different and distinctive, and that lends itself to the playing of the peculiar compositions of our race. My success had come from a realisation of the advantages of sticking to the music of my own people."

He later said:

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."

His 'Society Orchestra' (hired at great cost by the social elite) soon became famous throughout the US, in part due to backing the hugely popular white dance act Vernon and Irene Castle who introduced the Foxtrot, which took America (and quickly after the rest of the world) by storm. The Castles had no time for racial discrimination, and travelled openly with Reece Europe's all black musicians.

In 1913 and 1914 he made a series of smaller group recordings of the pre-jazz hot ragtime style, then called 'Jass' and soon to be known as Jazz, the pronunciation given to the word by Black Americans.

However, the Clef Club Orchestra was not a small band typical of many that were then playing a simplistic, but increasingly popular 'Dixieland' style of jazz. Instead, Europe rose to the challenge of leading a large symphonic orchestra that played music by black composers to more demanding audiences. It performed numerous concerts between 1912 and 1915 in Carnegie Hall. A review in the New York Times from March 12, 1914 said:

The programme consisted largely of plantation melodies and spirituals that show these composers are beginning to develop an art of their own based on their folk material."

When the US entered the First World War, Jim Reece Europe obtained a commission in the New York Army National Guard, where he fought with outstanding courage and leadership as a lieutenant with the 369th Infantry Regiment (the Harlem Hellfighters).

His musical ability and reputation meant he directed the regimental band to great acclaim. In February and March 1918, the band travelled over 2,000 miles in France, performing for British, French and American military audiences as well as French civilians. The first concert included the Stars and Stripes Forever as well as syncopated numbers such as The Memphis Blues which launched the 'ragtime' music and dancing craze in France.

With peace came the prospect of greater fame for Jim Reece Europe both as a musician and leader of a movement to give Black Americans greater equality. In February 1919 he stated:

I have come from France more firmly convinced than ever that Negroes should write Negro music. We have our own racial feeling and if we try to copy whites we will make bad copies. We won France by playing music which was ours and not a pale imitation of others, and if we are to develop in America we must develop along our own lines."

In 1919 Reece Europe and his band made more recordings, and it seemed an illustrious and important career was ahead of him, one which may have changed the social and political history of 20th century America.

Sadly, it was not to be…on the night of May 9, 1919, he was stabbed in the neck by one of his musicians who he criticised for underperforming. He died from his injury.

News of Reece Europe's death spread fast. Composer and band leader W. C. Handy wrote:

The man who had just come through the baptism of war's fire and steel without a mark had been stabbed by one of his own musicians. The sun was in the sky. The new day promised peace. But all the suns had gone down for Jim Europe, and Harlem didn't seem the same."

Jim Reece Europe was granted the first public funeral in New York for an African American. Black activist Tanney Johnson said of his death:

He raised black musicians to positions of importance as real musicians. The public ought to know that in Jim Europe, the race has lost a leader, a benefactor, and a true friend."

When he died, Jim Reece Europe was the best-known African-American bandleader in the world and a figure of national importance in the United States. In recognition of his achievements, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Paul Hensby