“Half-Blood Blues” by Esi Edugyan, 2011
This is a story so familiar it seems predetermined. It is about some jazz-men in the 1930s-1940s
in Berlin and Paris who are of mixed ethnicity, dark-skinned and mostly ‘Americans.’ So you gotta know that Nazis, anti-Semitism,
WWII and racism are involved. These are
safe topics for liberal readers, who this book is obviously pitched at. It includes
Louis Armstrong in Paris, wetting the appetite of every Ken Burns fan. The genius music ‘star’ is a skinny young man
born in Germany to African-German parents, Hieronymous, who is known as ‘the
Kid.’ Is he like Kid Ory? He’s a brilliant sax player if the adulation
is to be believed. The whole point is to
cut a record called “Half-Blood Blues”
in Paris, riffing off the Nazi anthem “Horst
Wessel,” but turning it upside down.
So we have a femme fatale singer named Lilah who is a mix
of Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. Narrating
is the somewhat stupid and angry bass player Sidney; his long-time buddy, sharp-witted
drummer Chip; a German producer, a Jewish piano player, a big fat trumpet man and so
on. Part of this group cuts a ‘legendary’ record that draws the 1992 Berlin
jazz crowd to a documentary about the group, who are now in their ‘80s.
The supposition is that Hiero was nabbed by ‘the Boots’ in Paris, sent to a camp and died there, so only Sidney and Chip are left to attend the 1992 screening.
The best scenes are those of the evacuation of Paris, as panicked crowds attempt to board trains at the Gare d’Austerlitz or stream down the Boulevard St. Michel south before the arrival of the German army in June 1940. The most chilling is a visit to a zoo in Hamburg, which houses not just animals but Africans, Eskimos and Polynesians in open air cages. The rest is catty dialog between the band members and a bad love affair involving Sidney and Lilah. Looming over it all is, yes, scary Nazis and the band's political stupidity in the face of events, all for their love of the music.
Since no one can tell a linear story anymore, this one
jumps back and forth between modern and old Berlin, modern and old Baltimore,
modern and old Paris and points in- between. Poland even figures in. It actually weakens the story and seems more of an irritant than
anything else. There is no goddamn aesthetic
reason why it was done.
The main criticism of this very popular WWII genre – look at
Netflix, Britbox and others and count
the WWII films – is that it is safe, too safe.
The ‘good war,’ the obvious baddies, the obvious ‘goodies,’ the cultural
sophistication of jazz, the lovable half-black men, the talented genius – it is all too easy. This
is why you see almost nothing anymore about the Vietnam War except books by Viet
Thanh Nguyen. And Iraq? And Gaza? Nada.
A recent film by a young African-American director Ryan
Coogler, Sinners, is also a big
success because Coogler discovered ‘the
blues.’ Like jazz, the blues is another respectable genre which has also been
around for ages. Much as I love the
blues, it’s too safe nowadays too. To
top it off, Sinners is set in Jim
Crow times in Mississippi, featuring juke joints and yes, vampires. These are
all, at this point, deep cultural and political clichés.
Writers and directors have to write about the present. Some have, attempting to bring the fight
against fascism, racism or capitalism into our modern reality, or as close to it
as they can get. There are even attempts to pick up on current culture. But police brutality,
poverty, war, imperialism, police states or exposes of some fascist group in
the U.S. are tricky, as they involve politics.
As we know, politics hurts box office or positions on ‘best seller lists.’
They are not ‘safe as milk.’ Much as I
personally like jazz or Paris or hating on old-time Nazis, it’s too easy. Time to redirect our guns, if not for
anything else, to escape the cultural predictability of easy boredom.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: “Nazi,” “jazz,” “World War II,” "blues."
And I got this at May Day’s excellent used/cutout section!
Red Frog / May 31, 2025