Sid and Delilah become romantically involved, but he remains jealous of the attention she lavishes on Hiero, who is the more talented musician. Fortunately, a singer named Delilah Brown invites them to Paris to record with Louis Armstrong, and they accept, though it takes a while for them to get there, with several members of the group getting separated along the way. Sid backtracks to narrate the events leading up to Hiero’s arrest, starting with a violent scuffle with Nazi soldiers in Berlin a year earlier, which causes the band to go into hiding. Hiero is then sent to, and presumably dies in, a concentration camp.

Sid opens by describing a crucial episode-the capture of his friend and bandmate Hieronymus “Hiero” Falk, who is denigrated by the Nazis for his mixed German and African ancestry, in occupied Paris. Parts 1, 3, and 5 are set in Europe at the onset of World War II. The entire novel is narrated by Sidney “Sid” Griffiths, an African American bass player whose witty, colloquial narration frames his need to make sense of the past. The second follows several of the same characters some 50 years later, as they reconnect in unexpected ways. The first involves the struggles of a group of jazz musicians who are compelled to flee Nazi Germany in 1939. And then we will begin our discussion.Half-Blood Blues follows two distinct storylines, set 50 years apart. Join me Monday at 11 am EST for a live discussion with publisher Patrick Crean (Thomas Allen) about how this book nearly fell through the cracks before it had a chance to make it into print. It interweaves some of the biggest themes of the past century – racism, anti-Semitism, power-mongering – but it is also about jazz, friendship and the personal jealousies and rivalries that can turn the music sour. The novel, which is political, moral and philosophical, roams back and forth in time and place. They arrive just as the Nazi juggernaut thunders into France. Each member of the band has something to fear, including the blonde-blue-eyed pianist and Sid, the light-skinned African-American who can sometimes pass for white.Īs the persecution ramps up, the band scatters, with a few members, including black German trumpeter Hiero Falk, heading for Paris and a hoped-for audition with Louis Armstrong. When the Nazis take power, jazz is condemned as the degenerate music of blacks and Jews. The novel is about an inter-racial jazz band in swinging, libertine Berlin in the late 1920s.

Author of half blood blues