By Jon Garelick

Jason Moran, as virtuoso pianist and bandleader, enacted all of jazz history at the keyboard, from ragtime to no time, as the saying goes.

Jason Moran and his Big Bandwagon performing “James Reese Europe and the Harlem Hellfighters: From the Dancehall to the Battlefield” at the Berklee Performance Center. Photo: Celebrity Series/Robert Torres

The multimedia presentation by Jason Moran and his Big Bandwagon on Friday night came front-loaded with history. The program, “James Reese Europe and the Harlem Hellfighters: From the Dancehall to the Battlefield,” is, says Moran in his notes to his new recording of the same, “a meditation on the life and legacy of James Reese Europe,” the Black bandleader and composer who was a major force in the musical life of early 20th-century New York and who, through his work with his 369th Infantry “Hellfighters,” introduced Black music to his continent namesake and the world. Moran calls James Reese Europe’s music “one of the original Big Bangs in Black Music.” By digging into this music, its history and offshoots, its overlapping narratives, Moran is demonstrating a continuum in Black music and Black history, an “ongoing community narrative,” to borrow a phrase — and, by extension, American history.

If that weren’t enough to chew on, consider that the date of this show, February 17, was coincidentally the anniversary of the Hellfighters’ triumphant return to New York, in 1919, after fighting heroically (it’s the German army that dubbed them the “Hollenkampfer”) and a Fifth Avenue parade that extended from Midtown to Harlem. It also preceded by a few months Europe’s death at age 38, in Boston, following a knife wound he received from a crazed bandmate backstage at Mechanics Hall.

OK, then! So how was the show? In a word: splendid. Europe’s bands, by all accounts, rocked New York before heading for World War I, and included the great songwriter Noble Sissle among its ranks (Europe was also a visionary organizer of Harlem’s Clef Club, which acted as union and booking agent for Black musicians). Moran’s method has been to weave his own arrangements of the Hellfighters’ music with his own compositions as well as related music by others.

At Berklee Performance Center (this was a Celebrity Series of Boston presentation), the music was augmented by a video display of vintage and new filmed footage, also included in Moran’s album. This all contributed to an evening of musical theater. With the black-and-white images showing on the screen as the first notes of low brass came from offstage, musicians filed in one by one in the dark to take their places, with Moran taking his seat at the piano, upstage center, facing the band, his back to the audience. Then Moran, with the band still playing, turned to the audience and began to recite, from memory, the opening text from the album, describing Europe’s life and its meaning, suggesting that the show will be about “what it means to us and what it means to you.”

That’s a lot to take in, and not every word was audible over the music. But the music by itself soon took off, capturing the vibrant sound of Europe’s beautifully constructed compositions and arrangements with various interpolations and original bits from Moran.

As section and song titles appeared on the screen, the band dug into vaudeville-era staples like “Ballin’ the Jack” and “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” Europe’s music is described as transitional — coming out of the two-beat thump of ragtime but not quite the more swinging “hot jazz” that would follow with Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong. No matter, these were rich and probing renditions, full of the “jazzed” intonations that Europe’s audience heard, but maybe with some post-bop hindsight — faithful but not hidebound. The exaggerated slides of “That Moaning Trombone” (composed by Clef Club member Tom Bethel) were reined in somewhat but still full of color, girding a fast dance pace with a lovely middle section for reeds, and, as pointed out in liner notes to the “complete Pathé recordings” of the band, certainly unlike what was typical of military bands. And you won’t hear a more magisterial rendition of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” than the one offered by Moran and his Big Bandwagon — dramatic pauses, underlying dissonances, inserted “modern” solos breaking completely from the original into a new passage. The piece heard “as it was,” with the sepia passage of time, but also with up-to-the-minute reflections and “free” collective improvisation, anticipating not only New Orleans polyphony but also the late 20th-century avant-garde.

So it was for the totality of the show: a kind of double vision. Moran, meanwhile, as virtuoso pianist and bandleader, enacted all of jazz history at the keyboard, from ragtime to no time, as the saying goes. There was even a bit of electronic enhancement to parallel the cinematic montage on the video screen.

Jason Moran at the Berklee Performance Center. Photo: Celebrity Series/Robert Torres

There were passages, even in the Europe pieces, where I felt the ensemble was a bit tentative. But the overall impression was of a band totally kicking it. An extended solo feature for the 25-year-old star alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins was both plaintive and forthright. Tenor saxophonist Brian Settles brought latter-day gospel fervor to the passage from “free”-jazz legend Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts,” whose title was another rumination on the past just as its music was a closing of the narrative circle. The young trumpeter Dave Adewumi was stellar all night, with the kind of sweet, pearly articulation and intonation that could have been a masterclass in brass playing (or any playing), except that its reach took in a wide world well beyond the classroom. His extended a cappella solo deployed a wide dynamic range and sterling technique as it told a single coherent story. Otherwise, drummer Nasheet Waits (from Moran’s core Bandwagon trio) was idiomatically on cue all night, guiding the band through its multifarious transformations with light hands and beautiful sound — even his thunder-and-lightning smashes of a hanging sheet metal “gong.”

It’s hard to evaluate the video in terms of this performance. As seen with the Moran “Dancehall to the Battlefield” CD release, the footage serves as beautiful accompaniment to the bandleader’s recitation. There are great still photos of Europe and his band along with the vintage film footage. And there are evocative still photos — an old farmhouse (Europe’s rural past in Alabama?), an abandoned concert hall, the street under an elevated railway. But at Berklee, the various program titles that flashed on the screen were occasionally out of sync with the music the band was playing (“Ghosts” emerged several selections after we saw the word). There were also distracting filmed images of Moran and his band. I sort of get stadium-show Jumbotron live video of what we’re seeing on a stage 50 yards away. But at Berklee it was confusing to watch Bandwagon bassist Tarus Mateen taking a solo onstage while onscreen he was playing at some other time in some other place.

But all was forgiven when grainy footage of New York Harbor slowly panned to the silent image of Europe and his Hellfighters, back from the Great War, in their winter coats, playing aboard the deck of a ship.

In the show’s finale, the band droned a vamp, then one by one came to the front of the stage and formed a circle around Moran at the piano, until he stood, himself in “military” costume of trench coat and khaki shirt and tie. Moran stopped playing, and all 10 musicians joined hands and began taking heavy breaths in hocketing patterns — “Zena’s Circle,” a breathing meditation taught to the band by composer Pauline Oliveros. They were literally closing the circle. Then, after the musicians resumed their positions on the bandstand and began playing the simple ascending melody of his “For James,” Moran invited the audience to join in a sing-along. He coached us in reaching for the high note and singing it loud, first open-mouthed and then, fingers to closed lips, indicating that we should hum, lowering the crowd to a pianissimo before bringing it down to a final downbeat. For a moment, we were all one community.

Jon Garelick is a retired member of the Boston Globe editorial board and a former arts editor at the Boston Phoenix. He can be reached at garelickjon@gmail.com.