In “Memoirs of Lieutenant ‘Jim’ Europe,” Noble Sissle describes the moment in May 1919 when his mortally wounded friend, James Reese Europe, identified the irate young member of the Harlem Hellfighters who had come backstage at Boston’s Mechanics Hall during an intermission, flung his snare drum across the room, and stabbed Europe in the neck.
“Yes; that is Herbert [Wright],” Sissle quotes Europe telling the police from an operating table at Boston City Hospital, where Europe had been taken after the attack. “But don’t lock him up; for he’s a good boy — just got a little excited tonight.”
Europe, 38, was confident he would recover, but he never regained consciousness following surgery. Thus ended the meteoric life of the groundbreaking Black band leader and soldier whom Sissle’s other main musical collaborator, pianist Eubie Blake, would later label “the Martin Luther King of music.”
Some highlights from Europe’s short, rich life: Born Feb. 22, 1881, in Mobile, Ala., he moved with his family to Washington, D.C., where in grade school he began studying violin with Joseph Douglass, grandson of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Europe moved to Harlem in 1904, where in 1910 he incorporated the Clef Club, an organization and concert hall for African American musicians. In 1912, he conducted the 125-piece Clef Club Orchestra in the first of its concerts at Carnegie Hall, a key moment in jazz history for having introduced both ragtime and Black composers and musicians to that venue. Shortly afterward, he began writing music for and accompanying the renowned ballroom dancers Vernon and Irene Castle with his Society Orchestra.
During World War I, Europe obtained a commission from the New York National Guard. His regiment of Harlem musicians, including Sissle, shipped out to fight in France in 1917. As a marching band, the 369th Infantry Regiment is credited with introducing jazz to the continent that shares Europe’s name. As a machine-gun unit, the 369th Regiment fought so fiercely and heroically alongside French forces (American troops were then segregated by race) that the German troops dubbed them “Hollenkampfer” (German for “Hellfighters”). The 369th, having been collectively awarded France’s Croix de Guerre, returned home to a parade that went up Fifth Avenue from Midtown Manhattan to Harlem on Feb. 17, 1919, and shortly thereafter commenced the concert tour that would end prematurely with Europe’s death in Boston.
Rita Dove wrote poems dedicated to the parade, Sissle, the Castles, and other events connected to Europe’s service overseas in her 2004 collection “American Smooth.” But most Americans are unfamiliar with Europe’s story. Until recently, that included jazz pianist, composer, and artist Jason Moran. But lately it has become an obsession of his — one that will bring Moran to Berklee Performance Center on Friday for a multimedia performance featuring music from Moran’s New Year’s Day release, “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield,” performed by Moran and the Big Bandwagon (his usual Bandwagon trio mates, Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits, augmented by seven additional musicians).
That this Celebrity Series of Boston event is happening on the anniversary of the Hellfighters’ homecoming parade is happenstance.
“No, that’s a coincidence,” Moran explains during a recent phone interview. “But on the 100th anniversary of that day, in 2019, my sons and I took that walk . . . from 44th Street all the way up Fifth Avenue to 125th Street and Malcolm X Avenue. And it was cold. But I was thinking not only about the research of the project, but also playing the music. That we have to do this, we have to mark this occasion, because it’s a beautiful thing to think about these soldiers traveling up Fifth Avenue — playing one style of music in Midtown, and when they get to Harlem, 125th Street, they switch the songs up [from military marches to jazz], and the band disperses into the crowd and parties for days. But it’s just a choreography of the city, one of the first major celebrations in the city.”
Moran gets a similar, albeit less celebratory geographical dose of history every time he walks along Huntington Avenue, passing the Prudential Center, to teach at New England Conservatory. While researching James Reese Europe, he realized that he was passing the site of Europe’s murder each time he headed to class.
“All these years teaching at New England Conservatory, and then doing this research, finding out that Mechanics Hall was right across the street from the Colonnade [Hotel] hit me really hard, actually,” he continues. “It also hit me hard because it’s like him on a celebration tour, and an intermission in the middle of a concert. There’s a lot that happens in that moment backstage in a dressing room that really does shift things but also kicks things into action. I try to think that people learned the lessons from him, and they kept the work going.”
For Moran, keeping the work going has involved a lot of James Reese Europe since 2018. That fall he brought up Europe during a performance he and the Bandwagon gave at the Institute of Contemporary Art on the opening night of his art installation there. He’s performed his commissioned work “James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin” in London, Wales, Scotland, Berlin, and the Kennedy Center. Last summer, Moran and the Bandwagon focused heavily on Europe for their set at the Newport Jazz Festival.
At Berklee, the Big Bandwagon will be nearly identical to the 10 musicians featured on Moran’s new album, with one rising star alto saxophonist (Immanuel Wilkins) substituting for another (Logan Richardson). The setlist will duplicate that of the album, mixing modern arrangements of compositions by Europe and W.C. Handy with those by Moran and others. Europe’s “Ballin the Jack” becomes a medley with Geri Allen’s “Feed the Fire.” Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” is similarly adjoined to the traditional hymn “Flee as a Bird to Your Mountain.” In concerts, Moran has been turning his set-closing anthem, “For James,” into an audience singalong.
On the album, “For James” also includes Moran telling the 369 Experience, a band made up of HBCU students, how Randy Weston had once “brought me to his house in Brooklyn, sat me down, and told me, ‘I want to tell you why James Reese Europe was important.’”
Moran says he deliberately chose younger musicians to join the Bandwagon for the album and Friday’s performance. “The trumpeter is a kid who went to New England Conservatory, David Adewumi, and the trombonist, Chris Bates, is a kid who I met at Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead,” he explains. “Immanuel Wilkins is in his 20s. I think it’s really important to have these kids in the crew, putting this into their early life so that they can understand the importance of it, and not having to wait until their 40s.”
Another local connection to Europe’s death in Boston is even lesser-known than the story of Europe’s life.
”Noble Sissle talks about all of the famous people who are coming to visit [Europe] during the intermission,” says Moran. “And one of them is the great singer and spirituals arranger Roland Hayes. So Roland Hayes is in that room. That’s incredible, right?”
Europe left for the hospital telling Sissle he would see him the next morning, when the band would be performing on Boston Common.
“But he didn’t make it out of that hospital,” Moran says. As for Wright, “now that guy goes to jail, and when he gets out of jail he starts teaching drum lessons. And one of his students is [the great drummer and Roxbury native] Roy Haynes. That’s how history works. That’s also something that I can’t stop thinking about.”
“The last little component of it is that Herbert Wright played snare drum, and one of the defining characteristics, if not the most defining sonic characteristic, of Roy Haynes’s style is the way he tunes his snare drum. To me it’s like, ‘Oh, now all of this makes a bit more sense.’ It doesn’t tell the full story, but it does give you the line, and so you see the constellation a little bit more clearly.
“And that’s why I think James Reese Europe is important: because what he explodes in his short life [is] the possibility, the scale, the collectivity of it all. The danger. He goes face-first into all of it. And I think, by virtue of what he was able to accomplish, and the ultimate sacrifice, we now bask in that glow that he left behind for us.”
JASON MORAN AND THE BIG BANDWAGON
At Berklee Performance Center. Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. $29-$70. Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston. celebrityseries.org/productions
Bill Beuttler can be reached at bill@billbeuttler.com.