Notes

The following originally appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:

Let your mind travel for a moment to the New York City of 1905. 

Let it drift over the nocturnal bustle of the city, illuminated by the white-hot light of the gas luminaires that hang from the gooseneck masts of the new mantle lamps now rising over each of the five boroughs.  Let it waft uptown, into Harlem, and then alight at the corner of 134th Street and Seventh Avenue, outside the ostentatious facade of Barron Wilkens’ Club, the members-only cabaret that caters to some of New York’s most affluent citizens.  At this time, in the early days of the 20th century, Harlem is still a segregated community with a large Irish contingent… but this year has seen a rapid influx of New Yorkers of color, and Barron Wilkens’ has already become noteworthy as “the rich man’s black and white club.” 

There on the curb outside sits a seven-year-old white boy, bopping his round head to the syncopated rhythms pulsing from inside the club.  That’s a young George Gershwin, who will be mightily affected in his later life as a songwriter by the music he now hears emanating from Barron Wilkens’.  This music, with its swinging cadences and brassy bombast, is heady stuff indeed.  It is the music of a man who will go on to help invent jazz, develop the fox trot and fight for his country in the trenches of France. 

You see, that’s the music of the great James Reese Europe, an American hero by any standard.

Reese was born in 1881 in Mobile, Alabama to Henry and Lorraine Europe, themselves musicians who lost no time inculcating their only son in all matters musical.  After moving to Washington, D.C. in 1891, the young Europe studied with violin virtuoso Enrico Hurlei of the Marine Corps Band.  When he was 22, Europe moved to New York and sought work as a professional violinist.  Frustrated by the color bias he encountered in the world of classical music, Europe took on piano-playing gigs in cabarets and speakeasies.  During these journeyman years, Europe befriended many other black musicians in New York, including songwriter Bob Cole and his prodigious partners, the brothers J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson.  In 1907, when Cole and the Johnsons needed a musical director for their latest black musical  THE SHOO-FLY REGIMENT, they turned to Europe, inaugurating a career that would eventually see the young bandleader become the conductor for world-famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle.  It was with the Castles that Europe helped develop the fox trot, a dance craze that swept the nation (and — unlike the other so-called “animal dances” of its time like the horse trot and the chicken scratch — survived to become a staple of DANCING WITH THE STARS).

In the future, we’ll tell the whole story of a man who became an American war hero and who jazz great Eubie Blake called “the Martin Luther King of music” (including how he was brutally murdered in 1919) in this space.  Please join us then in celebrating a man whose name should be better known today.