So here goes. I woke up this morning …

And like Bessie Smith I had an aching head and a space beside me – my wife having long since upped and gone to work. Unlike Bessie, no one could liken me to a ‘bloom in an empty bed’. Coffee sorted the headache while I stared out at a grey summer sky and watched the cat work through his morning psychotic episode, defoliating a clematis and flying through the air at washing on the line like a kung-fu trained Arnold Layne. My daughter came down to start watching Spongebob Squarepants – which gives me the willies. Thus began day 3 of the school holidays.

Fortunately, there are many kinds of blue. I’m delighted that Esi Edugyan‘s novel Half Blood Blues has made the Booker longlist. It was published about a month ago, and since the adaptation we did for radio has now been broadcast, I’m free to enthuse about it as a private citizen. It tells the story of an American-German jazz band in Berlin and Paris during the lead up to war, in particular the fate of the rhythm section – Sid and Chip from Baltimore – and trumpet-prodigy Hieronymus Falk: a German citizen but a mischling, his mother a Rhinelander, his father black African. After the fall of Paris in 1940, Hieronymus is arrested, deported and never seem again. Or so it seems … I won’t say any more about the plot because I hope you’ll read it for yourselves.

A lukewarm, agenda-driven review in The Guardian picked up on Falk’s racial origins and lamented an opportunity missed to engage more directly with Afro-German experience. This isn’t a view I share. Enjoy instead the freshness lent by a Baltimore jazzman’s idiom to well-trodden historical events like Kristallnacht and the ‘Casablanca-moment’ when the Germans march into Paris. Enjoy a tale of love and betrayal with an ‘Amadeus’ twist about genius and mediocrity, narrated by Sid, journeyman bass-player and conflicted, jealous and all-too-human narrator; a walk-on part by Louis Armstrong; all that jazz. Most of all, enjoy all that storytelling.

Time to chase away them Tootin’ Bec blues. The sun is trying to pierce the clouds. The kids need me, I think. And I have a pile of short stories that need reading. But that’s a song for another day.