"New York has always drawn to itself the talent and ambition of young men from every part of the country. Not only were among 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 performance concerts between battles, he introduced jazz to France, instigating a musical love affair that continues unabated today.
Perhaps most astounding of all is the record of this man who, at the very height of success in the white world, expended most of his energies on bettering conditions for black musicians, leaving Eubie Blake to recall him as "the Martin Luther King, Jr., of music."
Active in the classical field, trained as a musician and composer, be brought black music and black musicians to Carnegie Hall for the fist time in the history of that auditorium. Yet he insisted, in his own conduct and in the advice he gave other artists of his race, that they remain true to their own cultural heritage and not become more echoes of the mainstream.
Jim Europe was born in 1881 in Mobile, Alabama, where his family lived until he was ten. They then moved to Washington. D.C., where he completed his formal education and continued his musical studies, studies he pursued even after he had achieved notable success. In 1904, he left his family (all of whom seem to have had musical talent) for the mecca of New York where so many artists and arts converged.
He found work in a number of different areas of the music scene; touring with shows, which kept him pretty much on the road for three years, playing small clubs and cabarets with his dance band; giving lessons and recitals. There were many opportunities for playing before live audiences in those early days of recording, but most of the god paying jobs were down town and not in Harlem, where there were many musicians but no organization, no
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