Half Blood Blues is a novel by Esi Edugyan. It is a territory that is rarely successful for the writer, the music and the musicians. Surely there have been many successful books on writers, painters, even sculptures. But novels in which composition and performance of music figure prominently are often far less than significant and, frankly, often unsuccessful. Perhaps it has to do with the non-visual, largely abstract, and wholly personal nature of sound effects and our individual responses to it. It’s hard to avoid cliché when words have to describe music. Time, surely, also plays its part, since for the listener the music exists within its own time that cannot be controlled or compressed into a phrase.
After such a preamble, the congratulations to Esi Edugyan for her convincing portrayal of jazz musicians in Half Blood Blues are significant. We are in the late 1930s, long before free speech or even bebop, in a period when Sydney Bechet was still in style and Louis Armstrong was still in style, but these characters meeting in the Berlin of before war make a convincing band. In the pages of the novel, we feel what it would be like to play the bass, the horn, the trumpet or the bass. Drummers, perhaps, like guitarists have always been a breed apart.
Half Blood Blues centers on the life of Hiero, a German who happens to be a black jazz musician. With his bandmates Chip and Sid, he makes a living playing clubs in a city where the expression they choose is now considered degenerate. Just a few years earlier, American music, even jazz performed by blacks, had been popular, but times have changed. The musicians feel that change, but Hiero feels it more deeply, because he is now doubly removed from the country he must call home. Changing times, the outbreak of war and the threat of violence force the gang to flee to Paris, hoping to escape across the Atlantic.
Like stereotypical entertainers, bohemians are somewhat scattered in their habits, seeking casual sex, using drugs, and eating sporadically. Delilah enters their lives. It presents a different approach to life and an almost surreal vision of what men assume to constitute a woman and therefore seems to influence the lives of these men as they seek their expression, albeit personal, through the ensemble and its public sound.
The book opens in Paris in 1940 and revisits later. The band had to flee their home in Germany. He also lives in Berlin in 1939 to trace the origins of the gang’s flight from Nazism and then revisits the same city in 1992, as a pair of characters trace what might have happened as a result of actions over 50 years earlier. .
When they arrive in Poland in 1992 in an attempt to locate one of their own, they are completely shocked, exonerated, if not forgiven. At the heart of the story, the influence of music, especially improvisation, is paramount. It is what you do now in this moment that matters. You can plan, you can reflect, you can even rehearse. But the now is all that matters. Just keep playing.
Esi Edugyan uses a certain style of language here and there to characterize the protagonists as jazz musicians and in some cases foreign and in others black. It is not overused and thus achieves his intent, so it rarely comes between the character and the reader. Intent, however, successfully communicates the characters’ status as outsiders and is never overused.
At the heart of this novel, whose plot is significant and therefore will not be described here, is an act of betrayal, selfishness and duplicity that has lain in consciousness for decades. The victim, once tracked, indicates that life went on and reaffirms the importance of engaging with the here and now. All of which shows that you can contemplate to the bottom of your heart and even analyze endlessly, but the only real advice is to move on and life will create itself. Makeshift.