The undoubted highlight of this year’s Torino Jazz Festival was its closing event, staged on 30 April to coincide with UNESCO’s International Jazz Day. For the occasion, Artistic Director Stefano Zenni conceived a bold and unique European premiere, handing the reins to Jason Moran. The US pianist/composer was joined by his acclaimed Bandwagon Trio and the Torino Jazz Festival All-Stars – a hand-picked ensemble of some of Italy’s most distinguished jazz musicians.
This wasn’t merely a concert; it was a powerful act of historical reclamation, shining a long-overdue spotlight on James Reese Europe, a pivotal figure in early jazz who remains conspicuously absent from most canonical histories of the music.
The build-up to the concert had begun on the previous day, 29 April, with a public lecture at the University of Turin, just steps from the Mole Antonelliana, one of the city’s main architectural landmarks. The talk was delivered by Professor Francesco Martinelli (*) – an internationally respected authority on African-American music. The event was hosted by Professor Jacopo Tomatis, a scholar of Popular Music and Ethnomusicology, and mostly attracted an audience of students. For those present, it was a privilege to be reintroduced to the life and legacy of James Reese Europe through Martinelli’s lucid and deeply informed storytelling.
Born in 1881 in Mobile, Alabama, Europe moved with his family to Washington D.C. at age ten, and later settled in New York City in 1904. There, he founded the Clef Club, one of the first all-Black musicians’ unions in the United States. In 1912, he made history by leading a massive ensemble at Carnegie Hall – numbering between 125 and 150 musicians – and between 1912 and 1915, he made a series of recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Although the rudimentary acoustic recording methods of the time captured little of the band’s true sonic power, these records remain invaluable artefacts in tracing the early development of jazz.
Europe also collaborated with composer Ford Dabney to write music for the celebrated white dance duo Vernon and Irene Castle, with whom he toured extensively. But it was the First World War that marked a turning point in his life. Commissioned as a Second Lieutenant, Europe served both as a military instructor and as bandleader of the 369th Infantry Regiment – better known as the “Harlem Hellfighters.” His duties included training soldiers in the use of machine guns and grenades, and he was even hospitalised due to gas exposure. Nevertheless, he recovered and resumed conducting, performing for American, French, and British troops alike, and frequently for civilian audiences across France. After the war, he returned to the U.S. in early 1919 – having also recorded for Pathé in France – but met a tragic end that same year, fatally stabbed by his drummer Herbert Wright in the dressing room of Boston’s Mechanics Hall. In a strange postscript, Wright later resumed his musical career and even mentored a young Roy Haynes.
Europe’s untimely death and the scarcity of high quality recordings have been contributing factors to his almost complete disappearance from mainstream jazz history. And yet his legacy was fiercely championed by contemporaries like Eubie Blake, who called him “the Martin Luther King of music,” and by Randy Weston, who was the first to make Jason Moran aware of his story. In 2018, Moran paid his first tribute to Europe with a project at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and over time, the work evolved into “From the Dancehall to the Battlefield”. That project, which premiered live at Harlem Week in 2023, featured the Bandwagon Trio augmented by American brass players. For the Torino performance, the line-up shifted to incorporate top-tier Italian players, with a tuba replacing the original sousaphone.
Clad in a WWI-era military uniform, Moran took the stage with theatrical flair, visually recalling Europe’s wartime image. But the music was no museum piece. Eschewing any antiquarian gestures, Moran approached the early jazz repertoire with imagination and contemporary insight – qualities reminiscent of one of his key mentors, the late Jaki Byard. Like Byard, Moran moves seamlessly across eras and styles, reinterpreting jazz history not as nostalgia but as a living and evolving language. Apart from two original compositions that opened and closed the set, the repertoire was drawn from works composed between 1912 and 1919, including pieces by Europe and W.C. Handy. A hauntingly reimagined “St. Louis Blues” stood out, as did a stunning arrangement of “Flee as a Bird,” which segued into Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts,” with Pasquale Innarella’s incisive tenor providing one of the night’s many high points.
The performance was further enhanced by a striking visual component. Behind the musicians, custom-designed video projections by director Wolfgang Schernhammer added a cinematic dimension, while Moran – positioned centre stage with his back to the audience – remained engaged with both music and image. This was not his first foray into multimedia: in 2017, he presented “In My Mind” at Umbria Jazz Winter (a reprise of his 2007 suite honouring Thelonious Monk), and previous projects such as Artist in Residence (2006) and Ten (2010) also reflect his deep engagement with visual art. At fifty, Moran has become a master of interdisciplinary performance. His conducting and pianism offered flashes of real brilliance, affirming his stature as one of the most important and imaginative voices in contemporary jazz.
If his performance at Umbria Jazz in 2017 left audiences ambivalent, this time Jason Moran delivered nothing short of a triumph. We can only hope that this project – and his artistic journey – will continue to evolve and to reach new audiences.
(*) Professor Francesco Martinelli is also a contributor to UK Jazz News
Jason Moran Bandwagon & Torino Jazz Festival All-Stars
Jason Moran – piano
Tarus Mateen – electric bass
Nasheet Waits – drums
Giovanni Falzone – trumpet
Tony Cattano, Mauro Ottolini – trombones
Nico Gori – clarinet
Achille Succi – alto saxophone
Pasquale Innarella – tenor saxophone, flute
Glauco Benedetti – tuba
Wolfgang Schernhammer – video direction
