Half Blood Blues is a novel by Esi Edugyan. This is a territory that is rarely successful for the writer, the music and the musicians. Surely there have been many successful books about writers, painters, even sculptures. But the novels in which the composition and performance of music figure prominently are often rather less than significant and, frankly, often unsuccessful. Perhaps it has to do with the non-visual, largely abstract, and wholly personal nature of the effects of sound and our individual responses to it. It’s hard to avoid the cliché when words have to describe the music. Time surely also plays its role, since for the listener the music exists within its own time that cannot be controlled or compressed into a sentence.
After such a preamble, congratulations to Esi Edugyan for his convincing portrayal of the jazz musicians in Half Blood Blues are significant. This is the late 1930s, long before free speech or even bebop, in a period when Sydney Bechet was still in and Louis Armstrong was in, but these characters reunited in pre-Berlin war make a convincing band. On the pages of the novel, we feel what it would be like to play the bass, French horn, trumpet or 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 their chosen expression is now considered degenerate. Only a few years earlier, American music, including 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 should call home. Changing times, the onset of war, and the threat of violence force the gang to flee to Paris, hoping to escape across the Atlantic.
Like stereotypical artists, bohemians are somewhat scattered in their habits, looking for casual sex, taking drugs, and eating sporadically. Delilah enters their lives. It presents a different approach to life and an almost surreal vision of what men take on 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 it 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, while a couple of characters trace what could have happened as a consequence of actions of more than 50 years before. .
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 tale, the influence of music, especially improvisation, is paramount. It’s what you do right now in this instant that matters. You can plan, you can reflect, you can even rehearse. But 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 foreigners and in others blacks. It is not overused and thus achieves his intent, so it rarely intrudes between character and reader. Intent, however, successfully communicates the characters’ status as outsiders and is never overused.
At the heart of this novel, the plot of which is significant and therefore will not be described here, there is an act of betrayal, selfishness, and duplicity that has lain in consciousness for decades. The victim, once tracked down, indicates that life went on and reaffirms the importance of committing to the here and now. All of which goes to show that you can contemplate to the bottom of your heart and even analyze endlessly, but the only real advice is to keep going and life will create itself. Makeshift.