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Black Europe: The Sounds and Images of Black People in Europe, pre-1927. Various Artists. Bear Family BCD 16095 (44 CDs). Over There! Sounds and Images of Black Europe. Various Artists. Bear Family BCD 16020 (3 CDs). Bear Family's Black Europe is a monument, a Denkmal as German-speaking musicologists may call it. It collects every publicly available acoustic recording made in Europe by Africans, African Americans, and African Europeans. It also conveys vividly some aspects of the African experience in imperial Europe when it was ruled by kings, queens, and kaisers. For these reasons, Black Europe should be purchased by every collector of music of the African diaspora. Its list price of 750 Euros (approximately $1,020 US) may seem expensive, but to me as the present reviewer, a greater obstacle for the purchaser is comprehending the full range of its contents. I would be churlish to say of this set merely that it is good. Instead, I will summarize the contents of Black Europe for prospective purchasers, and I will help the future user to prepare in advance to derive the most from the set, especially the person who is examining a library copy. The physical dimensions of the box set are impressively huge. There are 44 CDs containing 1,244 tracks for over 56 hours of music and recitations. The transfers were handled by audio engineer Christian Zwarg from sources coordinated by Rainer Lotz and his research team. Two 12 x 12 hardcover books contain a total of 630 pages of documentation and visual illustrations, most of the latter in full color. These volumes relate in 106 chapters the history of Africans and African descendants in Europe, acknowledging the documents that are known but lost or inaccessible and scrutinizing the surviving recordings, writings and films of their performances and exhibitions. The texts were written by Rainer Lotz, Howard Rye and Jeffrey Green, with additional contributions by invited experts. Rye embedded artist discographies in the texts, with CD and track numbers for the recordings included in the set. A 45th disc contains an improved listing of the contents for CDs 1-23 prepared after the books had been sent to the printers, and indexes by names, titles, locations, sheet music, shows and transport ships. For all that Black Europe contains, there is much that Lotz and his team admit (chapter 9) is not included. For one, American recordings by the African American entertainers who performed in Europe are not given here. So even though George Walker and Bert Williams are given prominent coverage in the set's first volume for touring the United Kingdom with the hit musical In Dahomey, none of their recordings are included since they were made in America. Also, field recordings made in Africa of Africans are excluded, inclusion given only to those made in Europe. Likewise, the recordings of Africans speaking in European languages are not provided. Lotz and his team point out that African Brazilian groups embarked on performing tours of Europe, but since none of them made recordings east of the Atlantic ocean, they are absent from the set. Finally, Lotz says (chapter 10) that he had hoped to include a DVD containing all of the European silent film fragments of Africans and African descendants, but high licensing fees from some owners made such a plan prohibitively expensive to execute. Nonetheless, a printed list of these films is given in the first documentation volume (pp. 76-83). Collecting all of the extant acoustic recordings made in Europe by Africans and African Americans is a quantitative reason for this set; I think it is the only reason this set needs to justify its existence. But in chapter 9 (specifically on vol. 1, p.68), Lotz gives a qualitative raison d'etre, to demonstrate that the activities of African Americans in Europe were more widespread and earlier than today's Europeans and Americans believe. Moreover, as stated pointedly in chapter 1 (vol. …
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