When the 369th Infantry arrived in Brittany on 1 January 1918, they were not only the first African American regiment to fight for the US Army in the Great War, they also became the first people to take jazz across the Atlantic. The regiment contained a ragtime band called the Harlem Hellfighters, led by Lieutenant James Reese Europe, the best known black bandleader in the US at the time, who entertained troops across Europe before returning home as heroes.

Intrigued by this story, Texan pianist Jason Moran and his trio have assembled a seven-piece British horn section to pay tribute to Jim Europe’s music. Jerky two-step tunes that the Hellfighters performed are faithfully rendered, but with a novel twist. Rather like Ornette Coleman’s avant-trad mash-ups, these orchestrations paint an alternative history of jazz that stops in 1920, misses out half a century of swing and bebop, and goes straight into free improv. Moran lurches from intense ragtime into jabbering improvisations, while his horns also freak out, often playing an extraordinary series of sounds that sound like a tape being reversed.

What doesn’t work is the show’s multimedia component. In the last few minutes, the screen above the band shows some fascinating newsreel footage of the Hellfighters returning to New York after the war, but until then we are bombarded with annoying and irrelevant abstract black-and-white images that merely detract from the music.

Tragically, Jim Europe was killed by one of his band members a few months after the end of the first world war, and his dream of creating symphonic ragtime died with him. But Moran’s tribute keeps the spirit of his music alive without ever preserving it in aspic.