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James Reese Europe: A Forgotten Life
| Article
# : |
11589 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
3,469 Words |
| Author
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Rochelle Larkin
Rochelle Larkin is the author of more than forty books and
writes a column for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. She
resides in New York City. |
"New York has always drawn to itself the talent and ambition of young men from every part of the country. Not only were musicians like Jim Europe … drawn to the promise of success and prestige that the city offered but the young ragtime composers like Scott Joplin also felt the city's attraction …. For Jim Europe, New York brought success and reputation. For Joplin, it was to bring tragedy and failure."
Yet today, seven decades after the advent of these two men's music, that of Joplin is played everywhere and he is hailed as the father of a truly American innovation, and the name and the enormous achievements of James Reese Europe have been forgotten by all but a very few of the devotees of early jazz and the social and cultural history that preceded what we call the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties. And it is Europe, perhaps more than any other individual musician, conductor, or composer, who helped to usher in that age, and changed the musical and social tastes and habits of the nation and the world.
His achievements sound like more than any one person could have crammed into a lifetime, and it was a life cut short at that. His talents ranged over a broad spectrum in and out of music. His acceptance at the highest social levels of the Four Hundred is altogether astonishing, given that he was a black man at a time when Jim Crow and lynch laws prevailed over much of the country, and segregation was everywhere the accepted way of life.
He was also one of the few black officers in the American Expeditionary Forces of World War I. In that capacity he stopped a potential riot single-handedly in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And in command
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