The inspiration for Jason Moran’s new album, From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, came from a distinguished source, who passed it down like a family heirloom. Randy Weston, a fellow pianist-composer in the jazz tradition, was still performing in his mid-80s a decade or so ago, when he welcomed Moran to his home in Brooklyn with an admonishment: You need to know about James Reese Europe. (Weston, an NEA Jazz Master, died in 2018 at 92.)
“He literally sat me down in his apartment with his wife, Fatoumata,” Moran tells NPR. “They gave me a five-hour history lesson about James Reese Europe. And Randy Weston has a way of talking about history, and especially diasporic Black history, in relationship to the music we make here in America; he’s always trying to find these ties. He locates James Reese Europe as kind of a seminal knot-maker in the line. It’s like, ‘You’ve got to know the guy who invented the Big Knot.’ And that was really where it started for me.”
James Reese Europe was a fearless pioneer in African-American history: a bandleader, composer and organizer who laid the groundwork for jazz in the early 20th century. He also founded and incorporated The Clef Club — a first-of-its-kind musicians’ union, contracting agency and social organization whose resident orchestra he brought to Carnegie Hall in 1912. (The ‘Concert of Negro Music,’ as it was billed, is often remembered today as the first jazz concert in the prestigious concert hall, though “jazz” wasn’t a word Europe ever used.)