He survived 191 days in the trenches of World War I, led a machine gun unit through gas attacks, and returned home a decorated hero, only to be stabbed in the neck by his own drummer during a concert intermission in Boston. This episode traces the life of James Reese Europe, born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1880, who built the infrastructure that allowed Black musicians to thrive in a violently segregated America and reprogrammed the soundtrack of the 20th century.

We look at the Clef Club he organized in 1910 to centralize bookings and standardize pay, the 1912 Carnegie Hall concert where a 125-piece orchestra with banjos and mandolins performed only works by Black composers, and his refusal to add a Haydn movement when critics demanded proof of technical chops. The conversation follows his partnership with dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, the 5/4 composition Half and Half he wrote with Ford Dabney, his syncopated Victor recordings of 1913 and 1914, and then his combat commission with the 369th Infantry, the Harlem Hellfighters, who fought under French command with the notoriously unreliable Chauchat machine gun.

• Why the Original Dixieland Jazz Band gets credit for the first jazz record in 1917 despite Europe’s earlier recordings
• How the Hellfighters became the first Americans awarded the Croix de Guerre and Europe the first African American officer to lead troops into battle
• The 2,000-mile tour of France after his gassing, and how Noble Sissle described infecting audiences with ragtimitis
• The May 9, 1919 dressing-room confrontation with drummer Herbert Wright and Europe’s insistence that the show go on
• New York’s first public funeral for a Black American, burial at Arlington, and Eubie Blake’s view of Europe as a civil rights leader