The Father of Early Jazz: James Reese Europe

by Karl Ackermann
March 3, 2025

In 2020, I published A Map of Jazz: Crossroads of Music and Human Rights (WS Publishing), a book that looks at the culture of jazz on a timeline with cultures of the world. At more than 500 pages, the book is incomplete by necessity; there is no well-marked path, and the history is sometimes nebulous. However, as a map and as jazz music, it leads to unfamiliar places. The series Backstories dives deeper into people and places along the genre's ...