How does James Baldwin use the motif of jazz music to explore themes of identity, community, and the power of artistic expression in “Sonny’s Blues”?

By utilizing the grandeur of jazz music, the motif has been cleverly played throughout the story to bring up serious issues like identity, community, and the power that an art form can generate. Jazz becomes the canvas on which Sonny and the narrator illustrate the landscapes of their perceptions regarding themselves, the relationship they share with their community, and art’s transformative capacity. 

The first traces Benny’s closeness to jazz music, especially in his attempts to express emotions independently of the expectations and limitations attached to young black men in Harlem. The narrator views Sonny’s jazz as a worthless, chaotic event because he could not understand Sonny’s passion initially. The tenor/voice reveals the kind of sibling rivalries and differences of two very different lives that each brother must make with their common inheritance. 

The vividness with which jazz is a community-building agent is brought out when Sonny invites the narrator to the jazz lounge in Greenwich Village. The place thrummed with that fire, a slow-moving pulse that came out of a love for it all. And it was here the narrator saw for himself the communion between the musician and his audience, one which, while not exactly transcending, did push strongly against race and class boundaries. The narrator’s understanding of the transforming power of jazz comes, at least in part, through this experience; he sees how Sonny perceives the world, and now understands to a greater extent the sense of belonging that jazz gives him. 

One of the major roles jazz plays here is as a means of artistic expression through which one can attempt to make sense of suffering and the road toward redemption. Thus, Sonny’s music becomes his salvation, the means of externalizing his pain, frustration, and all the burdens he carries. It is through his music that he confronts the darkness within himself.

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