a piece the 369th Infantry band played when a soldier did not return from the battlefield. They are all marching into a void together, but they are led by the sound.įlee as a Bird/ Ghosts features Brian Settles. But none of them have ever performed in an actual war., and neither has JRE. The soldiers trust JRE, because he is a celebrity. I keep thinking that much of what is considered “Land”? And though these brave soldiers fought “for their country”, This bravery is something that I consider is the root of how abstraction is used in Black improvisational music. The whole wide world is wreathed in clover! This brought Black pride onto the stage and into the world.Īll of No Man’s Land is Ours was a song frequently sung by JRE’s right hand man, Noble Sissle while JRE played piano. In the early 20th century, James Reese Europe and others firmly understood that Black culture has a history, sound, and a code. Love, Jasonįrom the Dancehall to the Battlefield connects to one of the original Big Bangs in Black Music, James Reese Europe. From to the Dance Hall to the Battlefield, and back home to you. James Reese Europe becomes one of the seminal Big Bangs in Black Music. With his band of Black diaspora, he brought the music across the Atlantic, to the frontline of battle as his commitment to expansive vision was beyond.īeyond the last row of seats in the house, or the horizon of the trenches ahead. But the indoor stages proved only preparation for another dangerous stage, the battlefield of WW1. Because syncopation is about urgency, pushing the beat ahead to apply the anticipation of the oncoming downbeat, an outlook that is inherently futuristic. When James tagged 125 musicians to bring his brand of syncopation to Carnegie Hall, the new beat had arrived. It is the humanity that I hear in these songs and in his bands. What he realizes is that a required respect on the stage and off must be demanded, which culminated in the Black musicians union called The Clef Club. And when James then takes his violin up to New York, he is seeking a new sound to make, new folk to break bread with, and a new stage to plow, for The “stage” will always be a portal, a place to test what is real and surreal. The violin, hollowed wood, with a bow strung with horse hair abrading tense steel. It is in D.C that James begins to take violin lessons from Joseph Douglas, the grandson of Frederick Douglass because Douglass innately knew that liberation not only speaks from the mind, but also from instrument. In 1881, James Reese Europe is born in Mobile, Alabama, and in the pre-dawn of the Great Migration, his parents moved up to Washington, D.C. And YES, you will survive…or be survived by. They didn’t tell you where they were going, or what it would feel like, or sound like, or the stories you’d tell about all that you’d survive. They walked a very long way, saw you, and tagged you forever… then strode away, but kept you in their mind as they tagged someone else.
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