Couple of months ago, aureoled Leopold Stokowski got the U. S. Army to let him tinker with a military band at Fort MacArthur, Calif. Shortly Maestro Stokowski proclaimed that martial music should be rescored, chiefly with more saxophones; that Army bands should be sent into battle in tanks and armored cars, tootling the while. Last week the American Bandmasters' Association, meeting in Madison, Wis., officially resolved that Dr. Stokowski should mind his talk: he was "incapable of speaking with authority on bands."
The U. S. band which speaks for itself with the most authority is one at Fort Ontario, in Oswego, N. Y. There the 369th anti-aircraft regiment, a Negro National Guard unit from Harlem, is having a year's training. The men of the 369th get more from their band than most regiments do. Almost every night they hear a jam session, almost hot enough to melt the icicles on the recreation barracks. The band's leaders are Sergeant Reuben B. Reeves and Private Otis Johnson—onetime trumpeters in Cab Galloway's and Don Redman's orchestras.
Bandmaster of the 369th for more than four years has been Russell Wooding, onetime Broadway arranger and conductor, onetime bandmaster for the New York Giants football team. Bandmaster Wooding works his men hard, says: "All of us realize that we have a great tradition to uphold." That tradition was begun in World War I, when the 369th was the crack 15th New York Infantry and its bandmaster was the late James Reese Europe.
In the early 1900s, when Northern popular musicians played only potted-palm tunes, big, black, Alabama-born Jim Europe held Negro jam sessions in a cafe in West 53rd Street. White folks dropped in, hired so many of Europe's friends to play "gigs" — single party dates — that Jim opened a booking office. He formed a Clef Club of Negro jazzmen, gave a concert in Carnegie Hall in 1911. He (at the piano) and his boys played for Vernon and Irene Castle. Once he excited the Castles' curiosity by playing Memphis Blues too slow for their brisk one-step. That, said Jim Europe and his friends, was how the fox trot started.
In 1917 Jim Europe and his manager, Noble Sissle (Shuffle Along), joined the 15th Regiment. The colonel made Europe band leader, raised $10,000 for instruments —30 reeds, a dozen or so brasses, two bull fiddles (for concerts). Leader Europe became a lieutenant, Sissle his drum major and top sergeant. The two of them were soon putting riffs in conventional marches, had the band blare blues to a fare-thee-well. When the 15th reached France, Europe's band was detailed to play for U. S. soldiers just back from the front lines.
Mustered out of the 15th Jim Europe picked up a band, played at Manhattan Opera House, went on tour billed as Jim Europe and His Hell Fighters Band. In Boston, near the end of the tour, he had an altercation with Herbert Wright, broth' er of his drummer. Wright pulled a knife, slashed Europe's jugular vein. Few hours later, in a hospital bed, Jim Europe said: "Sissle, carry on as I have outlined," and died.