In “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, jazz music is used as a motif to explore themes of identity, community and the power of artistic expression. The narrator is introduced to what jazz music can do by his brother, Sonny, who is a wanderer and suffers from a heroin addiction that the author is unsure how to help with. At the location of their mother’s funeral, the narrator is first introduced to Sonny’s love for jazz when he asks him what he wishes to do with his life. Rather than Sonny striving for something “practical” with his life, he wishes to pursue being a jazz musician. The narrator has trouble understanding this, but to Sonny, jazz is the only way for him to escape the drug riddled streets of Harlem, especially having lost both parents. Jazz is the only means of self expression that Sonny believes he has as a poor black man, and his love for it motivates him, even through the depths of his addiction. 

In terms of community, the narrator is shocked to see how beloved Sonny is when the two of them enter a nightclub where Sonny will pay. The patrons and performers alike greet Sonny with open arms, even with the year-long hiatus he took in order to be rehabilitated for his drug use. They are glad to see him, and are excited to watch him perform because jazz has fostered a community in these nightclub goers, a community that is brought together by music, and can overlook the struggles and shortcomings of others, for the sake of continuing to make an impactful form of art. Additionally, the narrator is shocked that the jazz listeners are also friendly to him, but only because he is related to Sonny’s musical genius. Where the narrator is a military man, with a stable job and a loving family and his brother is a recovering drug addict, the narrator is not given more respect than his brother. Rather than social class being the determinant of popularity like in many other social spaces, Sonny’s prowess as a performer is what matters here, and begins to open the narrator’s eyes to the power of jazz.

Lastly, artistic expression has the power to deeply resonate with the consumer, or the listener in the case of jazz music. While Sonny starts off rough after not having performed in over a year, he begins to play in a way that emotionally opens up the narrator. The narrator is pulled into memories of his dead parents and daughter, and the tears of his wife, and he has something akin to an eureka, deeply understanding both himself and his brother for the first time, simply through the raw emotion coming through Sonny’s music.

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