My vote goes to early jazz and ragtime bandleader James Reese Europe to represent the US. If you can say two things about American music of the 20th and 21st centuries they would be that (a) it is by-and-large the product disparate musical traditions fusing with each other, especially African with European, and (b) it has been massively exported and imitated around the globe. In a lot of ways James Reese Europe can be seen as an early focal point of both of these things. Aside from the fact he's simply one of the great early jazz talents, he is a key figure in American musical history in that his band was the first jazz/proto-jazz band to play Carnegie Hall—thus helping introduce jazz music to a more mainstream white American audience—and also the first jazz/proto-jazz band to perform in Europe (in 1918), thereby opening the door to many, many decades of American musical exportation.
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