Edugyan tunes into jazz band’s struggles

“Half-Blood Blues.” By Esi Edugyan. Picador. 336 pages. $15.

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In its tale of squabbling jazz musicians at the onset of World War II, Canadian writer Esi Edugyan’s novel “Half-Blood Blues” probes difficult, eternal questions about art and genius: “Do you still call it talent, if it blooms without any kind of nurturing?”

It pokes into the dark corners of love, too, fraternal and romantic. And it does so in Nazi-dominated Germany and France, where a black man’s death could meet him any day on the street. Edugyan’s impressive story has truly earned its multiple major-prize nominations, including the Giller Prize for Canada’s top novel in English.

“Think about it. A bunch of German and American kids meeting up in Berlin and Paris between the wars to make all this wild, joyful music before the Nazis kick it to pieces,” says American bassist Sid Griffiths, light-skinned enough to pass for white. Edugyan’s story shifts between those interwar years of excitement and danger, and a surprising reunion of old men in 1992.

In 1939, Griffiths and his childhood friend, drummer Chip Jones, connect with a teenage trumpet prodigy, the black German Hieronymous Thomas Falk. The next year they cut a transcendent track, “Half-Blood Blues,” in Paris before the Nazis whisk the visa-less Falk away.

Narrator Griffiths, the “least famous of the band,” both realizes and resents Falk’s extraordinary talent. “It ain’t fair that I struggle and struggle to sound just second-rate, and the damn kid just wake up, spit through his horn, and it sing like nightingales.”

Griffiths also resents the attention the young trumpeter receives from Delilah Brown, the singer- turned-agent who promises to connect them with Louis Armstrong in Paris. “She the most stunning and original thing I ever known,” Griffiths says. But to Griffiths, she’s also “sweet like lemon in a wound.” Seeing how Brown looks at Falk, Griffiths laments, “Is that what genius does _ entitles a gate to claim whatever pieces of others’ lives he wants?” Both Falk and Brown might be described as “half-bloods,” and Griffiths wonders which one the song title might apply to.

Edugyan gives the jazzmen a convincing argot: fellow musicians are gates, the Nazis are Boots, men and women are jacks and janes; Griffiths’ speech is a convincing element of the author’s world building in the novel. Confined together several times while waiting for visas, the men grate on each other roughly, the way bored and anxious young men would. Wisely, Edugyan gives us the band mates’ responses to Falk’s musical brilliance without straining to codify it herself.

In the back half of the book she bravely brings Louis Armstrong onstage, every bit as impressive in her fiction as he was in life. Griffiths, upon meeting the legend, thinks:

“A man ain’t never seen greatness till he set eyes on the likes of Armstrong. That the truth. Those hooded lids, that blinding smile: the jack was immense, majestic. But something else, too: he looked brutally human, like he known suffering on its own terms.”

Armstrong offers Falk one of his old horns to play, setting off a “burning” in Griffiths’ jealous gut. In contrast, the bassist flounders during a session with the great one and begins to recede in the musical life of the group. Later, Armstrong tries to console him: “A man ain’t just his one talent. Little Louis (Falk) needs you. And Jones look to you like you his brother. You got the talent of making others your kin, your blood.” Given that Griffiths yearns for greatness and can see the group’s possibilities, whether he will accept this consolation is another matter.

In the ’90s, when the record “Half-Blood Blues” is a revered classic, devotees ponder the mystery of what happened to Falk. Griffiths may be the only one who really knows not only what went down in a Paris cafe when the Gestapo grabbed the young trumpeter, but also why it happened.