A Century Later, An Illuminated Eulogy For A Jazz Pioneer

For his multimedia tribute to jazz pioneer and war hero James Reese Europe, Jason Moran doesn't wear his usual performance attire. His wife, the musician Alicia Hall Moran, had some ideas for a more meaningful costume.

"She told me I needed to experience the same weight and pressure Europe and his soldier musicians did when they performed in uniform overseas," says Moran.

So as a kind of method acting tool, Moran sits down at the piano in a heavy army green trench coat and tightly laced boots. "Those boots are constricting," Moran says. "It's a small gesture, but it helps me remember what black bodies had to take for freedom."

Costuming is just one of the many ways that Moran seeks to inhabit the life and music of Europe, New York's most prominent black musician in the 1910s. Eubie Blake called Europe the "Martin Luther King of music" for his innovation as a composer and innovator, as well as his charisma and skill as an organizer. In 1912, for example, Europe gathered 125 musicians on Carnegie Hall's stage for the first concert where jazz was ever heard at the venue. He then risked it all, and changed the course of jazz history, by enlisting in WWI, organizing the first black infantry regiment, the 369 a group of soldiers and musicians which both fought on the front lines and introduced jazz to France, earning the nickname the Harlem Hellfighters.