Safe As Milk

 “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.  Of course, getting an MFA, which she did, requires one to toss timelines. 

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