WHAT IS HALF-BLOOD BLUES ABOUT?

WHAT IS HALF-BLOOD BLUES ABOUT?

PLOT SUMMARY: Half-Blood Blues is about a group of jazz musicians, the Hot-Time Swingers, trying to survive in Europe just before and in the early months of the Second World War. The timeline jumps around in six chapters--Paris 1940, Berlin 1992 (which opens in Baltimore), Berlin 1939, Berlin 1992, Paris 1939, and Poland1992. In pre-war Berlin the musicians are persecuted by laws against their degenerate music and laws denying rights of citizenship and travel papers based on their place of birth, parental nationality, and race. Two of the musicians, Chip Jones, the drummer, and Sid Griffiths, the bassist narrator, are African-American friends from Baltimore, USA. The pianist, Paul Butterstein, is Jewish and epileptic. Ernst "the Mouth" von Haselberg on clarinet is a German rebelling against a Nazi father. Fritz Bayer, alto sax, chooses to stay in Germany. Hieronymus Thomas Falk, trumpet player, is the son of a Black occupying soldier and a German mother. As a half-blood German-speaker, he has no papers. Although German-born, he is denied citizenship. Ernst's father arranges for forged papers, exit visas for all three including Hiero to pass as American (as long as he doesn't speak).

Delilah Brown, a Canadian American singer with two passports, comes to Berlin to ask the musicians to come to Paris and play for/with Louis Armstrong. They arrive a few months before Paris falls to the Nazis. Delilah arranges for visas to allow Sid and Chip to leave with her for the States but there are no papers for Hiero. As they wait for his travel papers, they decide to cut their own blues record which Sid saves and smuggles out of the studio before Hiero is really satisfied with the take. Their "Half-Blood Blues" is a jazz interpretation of the second official German national anthem, the Nazi Horst Wessel song. They had taken the enemy's signature piece and made it their own. Hiero, who has been ill, insists on going out for milk. Sid agrees to accompany him. While Sid is in the washroom, the Boots arrive. Hiero has no papers. He is arrested. Sid can only stand and watch. Hiero spent the rest of the war in a concentration camp and they heard he died shortly after being liberated. However, just before Chip and Sid are set to fly over to Berlin in1992, for the premiere of the documentary about their group, Chip reveals to Sid that Hiero is alive and living in Poland.

Fifty years after the war, in Kurt Caspar's1992 documentary about the group, Chip betrays Sid by accusing him of being responsible for Hiero's arrest. A crime, he calls it, caused by personal and professional jealousy. Denying Hiero the way Peter denied Christ. Sid continues to tell details of their last days in Paris, revealing that, in order for the group to complete the recording, he had hidden Hiero's visa and papers which would have allowed Hiero to escape to Switzerland.

After the premiere of the film, Chip convinces Sid to come with him. They take a bus to Poland to visit Hiero. Sid confesses the truth to Hiero who is shocked but comes around. He has matured. He does not blame anyone. Chip also absolves Sid, telling him "We all done things we ain't proud of, especially back then." "What you done was inexcusable, Sid. Absolutely wrong" but at the same time his old friend recognizes that "you'd have given you whole life to spare him if you could." The novel is about moral complexity and ambiguity, and the individual's need to come to terms with himself.