Jazz odyssey starts in Hitler’s Berlin

Mixed group’s tale touches on sacrifice.

Hieronymus “Hiero” Falk, a black-skinned, German-born trumpet player; Sid Griffiths, a light-skinned bassist from Baltimore; drummer Chip Jones, Sid’s black Baltimore buddy; Big Fritz, a white Berlin saxophonist; Paul, an Aryan-looking Jewish pianist; Ernst, a lowdown clarinetist from a highborn German family — these are the integrated Hot-time Swingers, a jazz ensemble struggling to stay afloat in Berlin in 1939, as “the Housepainter” Hitler tightens the screws on “degenerate” artists of all races and creeds.

Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan tells the Swingers’ fictional saga through the insinuating first-person voice of Sid, in sec- tions that shift back and forth between 1939 Berlin, 1940 Paris and Europe in 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall opens up a new world and disinters old sorrows and shames.

So-so bassist Sid turns out to be a first-class wordsmith, by turns lyrical and earthy as he recollects old passions, the joys of music, the squabbles of youth and the terrors of cities and civilians under siege.

Their mission to record “Half-blood Blues,” the number that gives this ambitious novel its title, is central to the Swingers’ existence and identity in their last problematic months. How important is art? What sacrifices are necessary and proper to its creation? What are the demands and the limits of friendship? Such are some of the questions raised in this soaring, engaging work that brings to convincing imaginative life an all-but-forgotten segment of jazz history.