15th Regiment “Harlem Hell Fighters” Band

James Reese Europe’s
15^th Regiment
“Harlem Hell Fighters” Band

by Richard Birkemeier

James Reese Europe

The Harlem Hell Fighter’s Band of World War I was one of the most influential ensembles in the early history of early jazz and its leader, Lt. James Reese Europe (JRE) is seen as a pioneering figure, the first “Jazz King.” He is also credited with bringing jazz to Europe during World War I and making all France “jazz-mad!” Most music historians still accepted this assessment, but new research has revealed that the influences, personalities, and chain of events related to this band need to be reevaluated. It turns out that there were several very fine African American military bands during WWI that performed in an early jazz style in France, and Jim Europe was not the only leader of the Harlem Hell Fighters Band, there were FIVE conductors, and all of them contributed to the band’s legacy.

The Harlem Hell Fighters Band is known today mostly through the set of recordings that they made in the spring of 1919 at Pathé records, made under the direct supervision of James Reese Europe. These were the recordings cited by the jazz historian Gunther Schuller over fifty years ago, when he wrote that the Hell Fighter’s Band, “in a real sense, is the first big band,”¹ and most historians today would still agree with that assessment. Schuler of course, gave Europe all the credit: “James Europe was the most important transitional figure in the pre-history of jazz on the East Coast,” but he didn’t have all the information that we have now and the complete story of the band has yet to be told, until now!

James Reese Europe’s career as a successful and influential musician in New York City has been well documented. He was a prolific composer, a busy conductor and dance orchestra leader, and despite his race served as the music director for Irene and Vernon Castle, the most popular and influential dancers of their day. At the outbreak of WWI, Europe enlisted in the New York National Guard 15^th Infantry Regiment and quickly rose to the rank of Lieutenant. And of course, it was at this time that he became the leader of the Hell Fighters Band, the band that made him a legend. An entire book is dedicated to his life and career, Reid Badger’s excellent A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe,² and Europe’s friend and colleague, Noble Sissle, wrote a detailed description of the formation of the band in his “Memoirs of Lieutenant Jim Europe,” an unpublished manuscript dated from 1942.³ But it wasn’t until Dr. Peter Lefferts wrote his “Black US Army Bands and Their Bandmasters in World War I”⁴ in 2016, that a more complete picture of James Reese Europe’s role in the creation of the band and its influence on jazz music began to evolve. And most recently, the Americus Brass Band’s recreation of the music on those Pathé recordings has revealed even greater insights into the early years of jazz music in America.

James Reese Europe was a highly successful dance orchestra leader in New York City but prior to his enlistment in the New York National Guard 15^th Regiment in 1916, had never conducted a brass band. Noble Sissle explained that “…he was not interested in bands as they were not flexible enough, they were too brassy and blasting… Jim hated blasting music and banging cymbals…”⁵ The dance bands Europe managed for the Castles, the Clef Club and later the Tempo Club were largely string ensembles with an occasional solo cornet and maybe a trombone. This explains why his knowledge of wind and percussion instruments seems to have been rather limited. So how did he wind up leading the most famous military brass band of WWI? Read on.

Egbert E. Thompson

The whole world knows that New Orleans had a thriving African American brass band tradition in the early 20th century but fewer know that New York City had one as well and two professional band leaders in particular, set the stage for James Reese Europe to form his band. The first was Egbert E. Thompson (1883⁶ – 1927), sometimes called the “Black Sousa,” who was most famously, the leader of the New Amsterdam Orchestra and Military Band in the very early 1900s. E. E. Thompson was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa and moved to Jamaica as a child when his father, a soldier in the British army, was transferred there. Young Egbert played in the British West India Band as a teenager and then received advanced bandmaster training at the famous British Band School at Kneller Hall in England. But after being snubbed as a band master in England because of his race, he immigrated to the United States and eventually arrived in New York City sometime around 1906. Thompson quickly established himself as a successful performer, composer, and brass band and orchestra leader at the New Amsterdam Musical Association. For the next ten years his ensembles entertained the African American community in NYC and as his obituary states, “…demonstrated to the late James Reese Europe that brass instruments could be used in the parlors of the wealthy…”⁷ This is the first reference to JRE’s limited use of brasses in his society orchestras, a fact that would cause him problems later when he tried to build his 15^th Regiment band.

Thompson’s earliest association with JRE can be traced at least as far back as 1910 when he became a charter member of the Clef Club and played cello in the Clef Club Symphony Orchestra.⁸ The association continued into 1914 when The New York Age newspaper reported that Europe’s National Negro Symphony Orchestra played a composition by Thompson on a Tempo Club concert. That event, which also featured dance icons Irene and Vern Castle, was held at the Manhattan Casino in Harlem and Thompson’s band also provided the music for dancing after the concert.⁹

As World War I loomed on the horizon, the African American National Guard unit in Harlem, the 15^th Infantry Regiment, was reorganizing and its commander, Colonel William H. Hayward (1877–1944) asked E. E. Thompson to form a band for the unit. (That’s correct, JRE was not the original leader of the 15^th regiment band.) Thompson was able to provide a forty-piece professional ensemble at the first color ceremonies in September, 1916. Unfortunately, the National Guard didn’t offer to pay the musicians and the professional musicians that he used were not willing to enlist.¹⁰ Ultimately, Thompson was only able to attract untrained amateur musicians for his new band and some of them didn’t even own their own instruments. The result was predictable and Lucien H. White of The New York Age newspaper wrote a disappointing review of the new group in October, 1916. The review made it all too clear that the 15^th Regiment band needed serious improvement¹¹ and Colonel Hayward decided to make a change in leadership¹².

Colonel William Hayward

It was at this time that Col. Hayward approached Lt. James Reese Europe, a machine gun company commander in the regiment, and asked him to take over the band. Lt. Europe had enlisted in the National Guard a year earlier and intended to fight, not lead the band, but his reputation as a well-known and highly respected musician promised to give the newly formed 15^th Regiment band the credibility it needed to attract the “trained” musicians that Col. Hayward wanted. Europe initially said no, but the promise of $10,000 to recruit professional musicians for the band made him change his mind and “the rest is history,” as they say.

Like E. E. Thompson, Jim Europe found it difficult to recruit talented players for the band. As was previously mentioned, his knowledge of the professional woodwind and brass instrumentalists in NYC was almost non-existent but there was another professional concert band in Harlem at this time that could, and did, provide some of the badly needed musicians to help make the 15^th Regiment band a reality. That band was the newly formed Manhattan Military Band.

Fred Simpson and the
Manhattan Military Band

The Manhattan Military Band (MMB), sponsored by the Manhattan Lodge No. 45, I. B. P. O. E. W. (Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World) was formed in Harlem in the fall of 1916. In November of that year, the Indianapolis Freeman newspaper, the foremost authority on the African American entertainment industry in the country, wrote the following:

NEW YORK HAS AMERICA’S PREMIER COLORED CONCERT BAND. What bids fair to be the greatest step toward the advancement of Colored Musicians in recent years, is the organization of the Manhattan Military Band, which consists of members of Manhattan Lodge No. 45, l. B. P. O. E. W. of New York City. Mr. Billy Butler, the well known trap-drummer, is founder and director of the band and the members were all initiated into the order last week.¹³

The article went on to provide a complete roster for the group. They were all seasoned professionals and included Cricket Smith, a fine cornetist who had recorded with JRE’s Society Orchestra (in 1914). Also of note, all four members of a well-known national touring vaudeville act called the Four Brass Men, lead by Fred W. Simpson joined as well.

Frederick W. Simpson (1871-1945) was a nationally famous trombone soloist called the “Black Innes,” and his story is one of the untold tales of the early Harlem Renaissance. Simpson toured nationally for many years, leading several top Minstrel bands, created the Four Brass Men for vaudeville, and played in Ford Dabney’s orchestra at Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic.¹⁴ The Four Brass Men featured Frank DeBroite, a Canadian cornet virtuoso; Clarence “Piccolo” Jones, another Canadian piccolo/flute specialist, and Sylvester Williams, a renowned clarinetist. They quit the vaudeville circuit in 1915, settled in New York City, and all four joined the Manhattan Military Band in 1916.

The MMB performed its first concert and dance on Nov. 10, 1916 at the Manhattan Casino and the Freeman wrote: “Billy Butler’s Manhattan Military Band, composed of fifty musicians, held its first stupendous concert and dance at Manhattan Casino, on last Friday evening, November 10th. The affair was both musically and financially a success.”¹⁵ The MMB played regularly around New York City in 1917, often accompanied by some of the top professional entertainers of the day including the Clef Club Quintette, Wilbur Sweatman and Ford Dabney. But at some time during the spring of 1917, Butler was replaced by Fred Simpson as leader, and to make matters very confusing, the band changed its name to the 15^th Battalion Band! So it turns out that for a year or so in 1917 & 1918 there were two bands that were associated with the 15^th Infantry and press clippings mention these as the 15^th Battalion Band and the 15^th Regiment Band.

The Battalion band was now led by Lieutenant Fred Simpson and their role was to assist in recruiting soldiers for the war. The 15^th Regiment band, led by James Reese Europe would actually go to the war. Peter Lefferts wrote about this unusual situation and called the two bands, the “old” and the “new.”¹⁶ But the two bands seem to have cooperated with each other by sharing some musicians, and Jim Europe served as guest speaker at the 15^th Battalion mustering-in ceremony in December of 1917.¹⁷ Four years later, after the war, Simpson was asked to re-form the Elks’ band of the Monarch (renamed) Lodge No. 45, of New York City and he lead the famous “Mi-Tee Monarch Band” until the end of his life. He was truly Harlem’s Bandmaster!

Jim Europe Build’s His Band

Meanwhile, Lt. Jim Europe was still trying to build his band for the 15^th Regiment. He was very fortunate to secure the services of the above-mentioned Manhattan Military Band’s solo cornetist, Frank DeBroite from the “Four Brass Men.” But Europe seems to have ignored the 22 woodwinds from that group in favor of musicians from Puerto Rico, of all places. E. E. Thompson may have influenced this decision with his Caribbean background and knowledge of West Indian music, and Puerto Rican musicians were well-known for their musical reading abilities, a skill highly valued in military bands.¹⁸ New recruits also included six (unidentified) musicians from Howard University and two drummers from the famous Jenkins’ Orphanage Band in Charleston, SC. They were the notorious Steve and Herbert Wright (not related) who would become popular attractions in their own right. But problems with Herbert Wright in particular, would haunt JRE, literally, until the very end. It was he who inflicted JRE’s fatal knife wound in 1919.¹⁹ But the Wrights’ former teacher at the orphanage, F. Eugene Mikell also joined the band at this time and he turned out to be a life saver, a hugely important figure to JRE and his band.

Before the band could hold its first rehearsal, the regiment was ordered to camp at Peekskill, NY for two weeks of rifle training and Col. Hayward expected the band to accompany them and play! Noble Sissle, now JRE’s administrative assistant, related some interesting stories in his “Memoirs” about the rush to throw a band together. He describes the ensemble’s first public outing, the regimental parade through Harlem on April 13, 1917 to board the train to Camp Peekskill. The band had had almost no time to rehearse yet they decided to play Sousa’s “Sempre Fidelis March.” This march features a prominent bugle call in the trio and may have been chosen because the band had an eight-man bugle corps. Unfortunately, the buglers had been trained by rote and when it came time to play the march in the parade, Sissle said it “was a disaster.” The buglers began playing at the correct time, but they were having so much fun blowing their horns that they refused to stop when the march came to an end and JRE had to run back to the bugle section that was marching behind the band and pull the instruments from their lips!²⁰ Despite this inauspicious debut, the weeks of rehearsal at Camp Peekskill helped the band pull together into a credible ensemble that received increasing praise from the officers and soldiers alike. But surprisingly, Sissle relates that the band was mostly trained by Gene Mikell and Frank DeBroite, because JRE was frequently absent due to his increasingly poor health.

Gene Mikell and Frank DeBroite Step In

F. Eugene Mikell (1880 – 1932) was a well known musician, composer, band and orchestra leader, and at the time was a teacher on the faculty of the Settlement House School of Music in New York City and musical director at the Bordentown, NJ M. T. & I. School. Born in Charleston, SC, he attended Avery Institute in that city, the Tuskegee Institute and the State College at Orangeburg, SC. He organized the famous Jenkins Orphanage Band in Charleston, had charge of the band and orchestra at Tuskegee Institute, and taught at the Daytona-Cookman Institute in Daytona, Fl before coming to New York City early in the 20th century.²¹

The previously mentioned Frank DeBroite (1874 – c.1950?) from the Manhattan Military Band, was a Canadian-born cornet soloist who had been working the Sun Times minstrel/vaudeville circuit in the US since the early 1900s. He joined Fred Simpson’s Richards and Pringle’s show band in 1911 and, in 1912, helped him form the Four Brass Men for vaudeville. He and his wife moved to NYC in 1915 and remained there through his service in WWI. DeBroite was a band sergeant of the Hell Fighter’s Band and stayed to tour and record with the band after the war. DeBroite also recorded with Noble Sissle’s Sizzling Syncopators in 1921 but seems to have disappeared from the NY music scene soon thereafter. He and his wife had returned to Canada by 1930.²²

Frank DeBroite?

Both Mikell and DeBroite stepped into leadership roles with the new 15^th Regiment band at Camp Peekskill. Mikell became Europe’s assistant band director and DeBroite, who Sissle described as “America’s Premier Negro Cornet Soloist”²³ played solo cornet and also assisted with the baton. Sissle says that under their leadership, by late spring 1917 the band was already playing in what he called a “jazz style.” This might have been because Col. Hayward’s favorite marches were “Army Blues”²⁴ and W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues.”²⁵ Sissle called these “jazz songs,” and of course the audiences loved them. So after they returned to NYC from Camp Peekskill that spring, these so-called jazz songs became staples of the band’s repertoire at regiment recruiting rallies all across Harlem.

The band’s next public performance was a big concert/dance fundraiser for the regiment on June 22, 1917 at the Manhattan Casino and, despite feeling weak, Jim Europe felt he could conduct. He was able to get through the first half of the concert and began the dance half, with its “jazz music,” but after the first piece, Europe turned the baton over to Frank DeBroite and Gene Mikell who completed the event. The event was a huge success and after the debacle at the parade three months earlier, the band had redeemed itself.²⁶ Europe’s surgery took place just five days later.²⁷

Final Training

The 15^th Regiment was assigned to Camp Dix in New Jersey in August 1917 for infantry training and the “new” (JRE’s) band played a run-out concert on August 7th in Poughkeepsie, NY for an evening crowd of 5,000 people. The local paper covered the event and mentioned that Gene Mikell was the leader and that Frank DeBroite performed as the cornet soloist. It is of interest that there was no mention of any ragtime or jazz pieces on the program, yet the concert was pronounced “one of the most enjoyable events of the season.”²⁸

Shortly thereafter, Lt. Europe rejoined the Regiment after his recovery and under his baton, the band played nightly concerts for all the soldiers at Camp Dix on a platform built especially for them. The officers even brought in a piano and Europe and Sissle performed songs that they composed themselves as part of the nightly entertainment.²⁹

Then in October, they were moved to another training camp near Spartanburg, SC in the deep south. It was here that the racial makeup of the regiment began to cause problems with the local population. Noble Sissle related one particularly nasty incident that he was involved in but that Lt. Europe defused, that speaks volumes about the plight of African American soldiers in the army in WWI and JRE’s abilities as an officer and a gentleman.³⁰ To avoid further racial incidents, the 15^th Regiment was renamed the 369^th Infantry Regiment, and rushed off to France before their training was complete. As they disembarked in Brest, France on January 1st of 1918, they were the first African American combat troops to arrive for WWI.

The Band’s First Overseas Performance

The band was the first off the ship and Col Hayward immediately ordered them to play the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Noble Sissle related that the reaction that this performance elicited was completely unexpected, but typical of the response the band was to get everywhere they played from that time on. And it represents the first description of the “jazz stylings” that the band would become known for.

When the first note was struck the French sailors and soldiers standing around hardly seemed to recognize the strains of their National anthem. …but suddenly, as the band had played eight or ten bars there came over their faces an astonished look, quickly alert snap-into-it-attention and salute by every French soldier and sailor present … we found out that (our)…inspired, rhythmic interpretation of the national hymns (had confused, but also) pleased the Frenchmen. In fact, it thrilled them to a far greater extent than their own bands’ playing.³¹

In other words, the 369^th (15^th) Regiment band was altering the rhythms (presumably through the use of unwritten syncopations) to such an extent that the music was nearly unrecognizable to the locals.

Jazz at Aix-les-Bains

After several weeks of entertaining their own regiment who were working at manual labor, the band was sent to the French resort town of Aix-les-Bains to entertain at a new rest center that was being established. There they played a concert for a group of French civilians and military officers and Noble Sissle described the scene.

The program started with a French march, followed by favorite overtures and vocal selections by our male quartette, all of which were heartily applauded. The second part of the program opened with “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” the great Sousa march, and before the last note of the martial ending had been finished the house was ringing with applause. Next followed an arrangement of “Plantation Melodies,” and then came the fireworks, “The Memphis Blues.”

Lieutenant Europe, before raising his baton, twitched his shoulders, apparently to be sure that his tight-fitting military coat would stand the strain, each musician shifted his feet, the players of brass horns blew the saliva from their instruments, the drummers tightened their drumheads, every one settled back in their seats, half-closed their eyes, and when the baton came down with a swoop that brought forth a soul-rousing crash both director and musicians seemed to forget their surroundings; they were lost in scenes and memories. Cornet and clarinet players began to manipulate notes in that typical rhythm (that rhythm which no artist has ever been able to put down on paper); as the drummers struck their stride their shoulders began shaking in time to their syncopated raps.

Then, it seemed, the whole audience began to sway, dignified French officers began to pat their feet along with the American general, who, temporarily, had lost his style and grace.

Lieutenant Europe was no longer the Lieutenant Europe of a moment ago, but once more Jim Europe, who a few months ago rocked New York with his syncopated baton. His body swayed in willowy motions and his head was bobbing as it did in days when terpsichorean festivities reigned supreme. He turned to the trombone players, who sat impatiently waiting for their cue to have a ‘Jazz spasm,’ and they drew their slides out to the extremity and jerked them back with that characteristic crack. The audience could stand it no longer; the “Jazz germ” hit them…Then I was…satisfied that American music would some day be the world’s music. While at Aix-les-Bains other musicians from American bands said their experiences had been the same.mfn]Sissle, p. 119-121.[/mfn]

The US 803rd Band at Aix-les-Bains

That last sentence is very important because it reveals that Jim Europe’s 369^th Regiment’s band wasn’t the only band that “made all France Jazz-mad,” there were close to a dozen African American bands in France during the war and they ALL played their music in a similar style.³²

The Military Entertainment Service

James Reese Europe conducting a concert of the 369th Infantry Regiment for the Independence Day in Chalons-sur-Marne (France). In 1918.

These band concerts for soldiers and civilians were offered frequently after the US Army decided back in 1917 to establish the Military Entertainment Service, (like the later USO) to provide quality entertainment to the troops. African American musicians and entertainers were an important part of the program from the very beginning and an African American was even appointed to the planning committee – managing and dramatic editor of The New York Age, Lester A. Walton. The MES mandated that theaters be opened at each cantonment and camp and quality entertainment be organized and provided to ALL the troops on a regular basis. The plan called for organizing talented soldiers from the rank and file as well as the bands, into “minstrel and dramatic companies.” These were to be created without regard to race and were to entertain in the US and in France after deployment overseas.³³ So it was not only the 369^th Regiment that provided jazz entertainment in France, all of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) units had similar companies traveling across Europe and many provided the new jazz music that folks enjoyed so much. Photographs and some news articles from the era make it clear that most of these “jazz bands” were usually small subsets of the full regiment band³⁴ but in the 369^th, clearly the entire band played in the new style.

After three months of back-breaking manual labor the regiment was finally assigned to a front line unit, but not in the AEF, they were offered to the French Army who gladly accepted their service. The band accompanied the regiment to the front line town of Maffercourt and as the troops marched off to the trenches for the first time, the band was there. Sissle wrote:

As we got to the end of town and turned off for the troops to pass on by, at the Colonel’s command we swung into the favorite of both his and the regiment, the ragtime tune called “Army Blues,” and the serious military attitude of the stirring march with which everyone had been overcome was immediately dispelled by the ragtime syncopated strains of the jazzed up “Army Blues.”³⁵

At this time, Lt. James Reese Europe rejoined his machine gun company in the trenches, but the band remained at the regimental headquarters and entertained the troops all that spring and into the summer. For two months, there was little action on their section of the line and the band entertained the troops with nightly concerts. They also played serenades for occasional VIPs as well as concerts in the local villages and assistant band leader Gene Mikell was in charge.

Mikell and the band were beginning to make a name for themselves in Europe’s absence. The Jacksonville (FL) Journal wrote the following in June, 1918.

PROF. MIKELL MAKING GOOD “OVER THERE,” Prof. F. Eugene Mikell, Bandmaster of the regimental band of the 369^th United States Infantry, writes most interestingly of his being with his regiment in France. Prof. Mikell, well-known in Jacksonville, where he once lived and taught music, leaving here to fill a position as teacher in a school in New York, and later took charge of the band of the Fifteenth Regiment of New York, which was among the first volunteer regiments to be sent over.

Before leaving this country this band had won considerable fame for its splendid music with James Europe, a noted musician as leader. The fame of this band did not lessen on going to France, and recently Prof. Mikell received a handsome baton from the band master of a French regiment, for excellent music before that regiment, and Prof. Mikell’s band is said to be one of the best in all of the allied armies. He is in line for promotion.³⁶

The article is also significant in that it includes a program performed by the band on April 14, 1918 for the relief battalion at rest behind the trenches of the 369^th regiment.

“Too near for the Bosche guns, Too far for the little ones.”
Conducted by Bandmaster F. Eugene Mikell.

Soloists – Cornet, Assistant Bandmaster Frank DeBroite: trombone, Sgt. Ward Andrews, tenor, Sgt. Noble Sissle.

Program

Overture, Zampa, – F. Herold;

“Indian Summer” (Suite). a. At Dawn, (b) Dance of the Pumpkins, (c) Love Song, (d) At Twilight, Lake;

Cornet solo, “Arbucklenian Polka.” (Hartman),
Asst. bandmaster Frank DeBroite;

Song, (1) “Billy Boy” (Walton and Roberts).

“Camp Meeting Day” (Mikell and Stasie),
Sgt. Noble Sissle and Company K’s Quartette;

Overture, Semiramede, Rossini;

Entr’ Acte. 2nd Partie.

“The Old Flag Never Touched the Ground,”
J. Rosamond Johnson, chorus of 500 voices;

Overture “William Tell,” Rossini;

Trombone Solo – “Maggie May” (Snow)
Sgt. Ward Andrews;

Our Drummer Boys (Hill),
Steven and Herbert Wright;

March Americaine, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” (Sousa)

(a) Star Spangled Banner, (b) La Marseillaise.³⁷

Again, there is no mention of any ragtime or blues pieces on this program. But it is probable that they played encores that included these ever-popular numbers.

Later that summer, Sissle relates a story of the visit by a famous, but notoriously racist writer from the Saturday Evening Post magazine, Erving S. Cobb. Cobb had been specifically asked by the military to write about the African American troops in France and everyone in the regiment expected the story to be demeaning and unjust. Col. Hayward of course, asked the band to play him a serenade concert and Sgt. Mikell and Sgt. Noble Sissle discussed what to play. Sissle related what happened next.

Erving S. Cobb

First the band played the “Stars and Stripes Forever” and then they started the “Plantation Medley” of airs….

But when the plantation melodies were started, after the first two or three bars of music had been played, there was a stop in the arrangement and as the band came to this pause, every member of the party was standing in wrapt attention. Quiet came over the entire assemblage. Even the French soldiers who had been attracted by the playing of the band, stood reverent.

It seemed to be the thought of every man in that band as they played, that here stands before us the man who had been our rankest enemy as a race and here so far away from home and our country, if we can just impress upon him through our music the love and faithfulness that we have for our country, perhaps we can convert him into being just as great a champion of our race as he has been an enemy.

…Concerning the above-mentioned incident, (Cobb) wrote in the August 24,1918, edition of The Saturday Evening Post:

“Two days we stayed on there, and they were two days of a superior variety of …vaudeville….the next evening when Jim Europe’s band of forty pieces serenaded us. I think surely this must be the best regimental band in our Army. Certainly, it is the best one I have heard in France during this war. On parade, when it played the “Memphis Blues” the men did not march…they literally danced their way along. As for the dwellers of the French towns … they fairly… go mad when some alluring, compelling, ragtime tune is played…and as the regiment has moved down…it has been hard to keep the unattached inhabitants of the village…from moving on with it.

“If I live to be a hundred and one I shall never forget the second night…We stood with the regimental staff on the main street, the band played plantation airs and hundreds of negro soldiers joined in and sang the words. Behind the masses of upturned dark faces was a ring of white ones, where the remaining natives of the place clustered, with the heads wagging in time to the tunes. And when the band got to “Way Down Upon the Swanee River” I wanted to cry, and when Noble Sissle, the drum major, who likewise had a splendid baritone voice, sang as an interpolated number, “Joan of Arc,” first in English and then in excellent French, the villagers openly cried; and an elderly peasant, heavily whiskered, with the tears of a joyous and thankful enthusiasm running down his bearded cheeks, was with difficulty restrained from throwing his arms about the soloist and kissing him.”³⁸

The band remained with the regiment near the front lines and one day Lt Jim, as he liked to be called, told Sgt. Sissle of his recent venture into no-man’s-land with a French patrol. Sissle related the story in gruesome detail in his Memoirs and then later, described how he and JRE composed a song about the experience that would become one of their greatest “hits.” Called “On Patrol in No-Man’s Land,” they wrote the piece while Europe was recuperating from a gas attack in a local field hospital later that summer.

James Reese Europe Returns to the Band

That gas wound proved to be a turning point for Europe and the band. The summer offensive was beginning and the band was pulled back from the front in August 1918. Noble Sissle, a band sergeant up until then, was reassigned to officer training, promoted to lieutenant, and transferred to the 370th Regiment. But Europe was also transferred – this time out of his infantry command and he was ordered to reassume control of the 369^th band which was detached for special duty in Paris. The “powers that be” were so impressed with the band’s performances that Europe was asked to do a special concert in Paris to improve the morale of the troops and French civilians. Jim Europe described that event in a famous interview with Grenville Vernon of the New York Daily Tribune.

One day, just before the Allied conference in Paris on August 18, Colonel Hayward came to me and said: “Lieutenant Europe, I want you to go back to your band and give a single concert in Paris.” I protested, telling him that I hadn’t led the band since February, but he insisted. Well, I went back to my band, and with it I went to Paris. What was to be our only concert was in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. Before we had played two numbers the audience went wild. We had conquered Paris.

General Bliss and French high officers who had heard us insisted that we should stay in Paris, and there we stayed for eight weeks. Everywhere we gave a concert it was a riot, but the supreme moment came in the Tuileries Gardens when we gave a concert in conjunction with the greatest bands in the world, the British Grenadiers Band, the Band Garde Republicaine, and the Royal Italian Band. My band, of course, could not compare with any of these, yet the crowd, and it was such a crowd as I never saw anywhere else in the world, deserted them for us. We played to 50,000 people at least, and had we wished it we might be playing yet. After the concert was over the leader of the Band of the Garde Republicaine came over and asked me for the score of one of the jazz compositions we had played. He said he wanted his band to play it. I gave it to him and the next day he again came to see me. He explained that he couldn’t seem to get the effects I got, and asked me to go to a rehearsal. I went with him. The great band played the composition superbly – but he was right: the jass [sic] effects were missing. I took an instrument and showed him how it could be done, and he told me that his own musicians felt sure that my band had used special instruments. Indeed, some of them, afterward attending one of my rehearsals, did not believe what I had said until after they had examined the instruments used by my men.³⁹

That concert in Paris led to many others and the band spent the rest of the war entertaining troops at rest areas and hospitals all across France. The 369^th Regiment fought with distinction in France, earning the nom de guerre, “the Hell Fighters,” and the band adopted that name as well. In fact, the band became so famous that after the armistice, Lt. Jim and his band returned to a hero’s welcome in New York City and he immediately began preparations for a national concert tour to “cash in” on their reputation.

Europe needed to replace some musicians who had mustered out of the army and gone home and his right-hand man, Lt. Gene Mikell returned to teaching at the Bordentown, New Jersey Industrial School (“the Tuskegee of the North”).⁴⁰ But Europe was able to keep most of his best musicians and the Pathé sessions include at least 18 of the musicians listed on the original “Personnel Muster Role – Headquarters Company, 369^th US Infantry Feb. 30, 1918.” These included Frank DeBroite and Jacob Porter on cornet as well as Sgt. Noble Sissle, Sgt. Ward Andrews (solo trombone), Sgt. Raphael Hernandez (trombone), Herb Flemming (trombone), and the two Wright “brothers” drummers. To complete the band after the war, he recruited Russell Smith and Piccolo Jones, both respected professional musicians in NYC and the Pathé sessions list eight or nine additional musicians as well.⁴¹ It is unknown if they were in the band in France or not.

JRE’s planned nine-week concert tour began on March 16th and included concerts in two-dozen cities in the midwest and on the east coast.⁴² He advertised his group as a “jazz band” and promised his audiences plenty of jazz and blues music along with more traditional concert band fare. The group featured as few as 20 musicians when he made his first Pathé recordings in March, but increased to as many as 80 at concerts in some of the larger cities later that spring.

But it must be noted that the Harlem Hell Fighter’s Band was not the only African American “jazz” band from WWI that began touring that spring of 1919. Lester A. Walton, the afore-mentioned editor of The New York Age newspaper, wrote a column in March 1919 describing in detail Europe’s coming tour, but also mentioning tours by three additional ensembles, two from New York City and one from Chicago: Will Marion Cook’s New York Syncopated Orchestra, Lt. Tim Brymn’s 350^th Regiment “Black Devils” Band, and George Dulf’s “Old 8^th” Regiment Band from Chicago.⁴³ All three of these groups played band music in a jazz style and continued touring well into the 1920s.

The Pathé Frères Recordings

In March and May of 1919, James Reese Europe’s band went into the Pathé Frères studios in NYC and recorded some of the earliest ragtime/blues/jazz records ever made by African Americans. These are the recordings that jazz historian Gunther Schuller called the earliest “big band recordings” and these recordings, more than anything written at the time, reveal what JRE’s band (and probably the others as well) actually sounded like. And that is what the Americus Brass Band’s recordings from 100 years later reveal as well. For a detailed description of the “jazz effects” used by Europe’s musicians, please refer to the liner notes for the Americus Brass Band’s recording “James Reese Europe’s Harlem Hell Fighters Band.”

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Tragically, after surviving 6 months in the trenches of France, James Reese Europe was murdered in Boston by the aforementioned Herbert Wright, less than a week after recording the final Pathé pieces with his band. His public funeral in New York City was the first ever afforded an African American and thousands lined the streets to show their respect. But the band could not survive as a “commercial” venture without Europe’s leadership and with the exception of occasional concerts in the NYC area over the next six years, led by Fred Simpson or Gene Mikell, the band seems to have exerted no more influence on the development of jazz.⁴⁴ Had Europe lived a longer life, one wonders how the history of American popular music might be different today. Certainly, his effective use of the wind band in the performance of jazz might have led to a different “big band” sound than that which actually developed in New York City during the 1920s. One can only guess.

So, Was This “The First Big Band”?

Most likely because of JRE’s untimely death, jazz historians have mostly ignored Gunther Schuller’s pronouncement from 60 years ago that “this is the earliest big band” (try googling AI!). But the fact remains that several fine African American concert bands from NYC and Chicago, followed in the HHB’s footsteps, touring very successfully across the nation from 1919 to 1922 and playing jazz for large, mostly White audiences. And one of them, Tim Brymn’s “Black Devils” (350^th Infantry Band from WWI), was the next to record, making several discs for Okey Records in 1921 that featured newly crafted arrangements and not just WWI era brass band music played in a “jazz style.”⁴⁵ Okey Records used a more up-to-date recording technology than Pathé and these recordings were much more widely heard than those of the HHB. But Peter Lefferts says it was the live concerts performed by these touring African American concert bands that spread this new “jazz” music far and wide across America and certainly influenced the jazz band leaders that followed. Lefferts concluded that:

The new jazz was the special thing that most distinguished these bands musically, and everyone claimed it as their own. It was not just Jim Europe’s band that brought jazz to the (European) continent; rather, it was something on the order of two dozen bands. Moreover, they played the jazz of Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington as well as that of New York City. Upon the return of the bands from the war, touring back in the States brought the new jazz music to dozens of smaller cities and towns, and to white audiences who had never before heard these exotic, lively sounds.⁴⁶ The response was strong and positive. By one report, “Since the return of colored military bands from France to these shores the country simply has gone wild about jazz music.”⁴⁷

James Reese Europe’s15th Regiment“Harlem Hell Fighters” Band