Jazz marks 100 years in Europe

A HUNDRED years ago inWorld War I, a group of American soldiers stormed Europe – not to the boom of guns, but the swinging rhythm of saxophones, drums and horns.

They came to fight in the mud against the Germans in a war approaching its end – but their arrival also marked the start of a sweeter, cultural conquest.

A hundred years ago on Monday, the 369th Infantry’s Harlem Hellfighters Band gave what is said to have been the first jazz concert on European soil – in the French city of Nantes.

“When the band had finished and the people were roaring with laughter, their faces wreathed in smiles, I was forced to say that this is just what France needed at this critical moment,” wrote one of the band members, Noble Sissle, in his memoirs.

Yesterday, Nantes launches a series of concerts, conferences and exhibitions to mark the centenary of that legendary gig.

After the first night at Nantes’s Theatre Graslin, Europe would never sound the same again.

It “turned France upside down”, according to local press reports from the time.

The 369th Infantry was one of the four African American regiments sent from the racially segregated Unites States.

James Reese Europe “was the first African American officer to lead troops in a wartime attack”, said Matthieu Jouan, head of the “100Years of Jazz” commemorations in Nantes. The officer also put together the 40-strong band which included “some of the best of the time”, Jouan added.