James Reese Europe and his Clef Club Orchestra bring jazz in its earliest form to Carnegie Hall with a “Concert of Negro Music” on May 2.
The audience to hear this 125-piece group perform a mix of ragtime, blues, and minstrel songs was “large and thoroughly mixed, but united in its applause,” according to The New York Sun.
Europe was among the first to translate the syncopated rhythms of African American music to a large ensemble, and during World War I he introduced this distinctive sound to France with his Harlem Hellfighters’ infantry band.
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