Hiero, as his friends call him, becomes the character on whom the plot turns - not quite the novel’s “hero,” as his name would be pronounced, but certainly the figure without whom the story would not take place. More problematic is the presence of the band’s young trumpeter, Hieronymus Falk, the son of a black African soldier and a German woman during World War I. The band they form includes three Germans, one of whom, an Aryan-looking Jew, regularly escapes notice. For both Sid and Chip, 1930s Berlin is a refuge from Jim Crow, and they can still earn a good living there as authentic American jazzmen - an irony in what is rapidly becoming the Nazi racial state. Although light-skinned Sid passed as white as a child, he identifies as African-American. But the music alone does not shape their lives racial politics are also a factor. Their complicated, and at times tortured, life-long relationship is the thread which ties the story together across several decades. Sid and Chip are two American jazzmen living in Germany whose sense of self revolves less around their Americanness than around their music. Half-Blood Blues is powerful because it takes place at the intersection between the “jazz world” and the politics of nations. Edugyan makes the most of this conflict by setting her story in Nazi and wartime Europe when the music carried dangerous meanings. Throughout its history, jazz music’s global identity has often collided with the peculiarities of the local cultures where it is performed. Esi Edugyan’s novel Half-Blood Blues, which was nominated for Britain’s Man-Booker Prize and won Canada’s Giller Prize, offers a compelling and moving story about jazz in Berlin and Paris at the beginning of World War II.
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