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from Sonny's Blues
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the
rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear,
or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates
the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing
order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible
because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when
he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny's face. His face was troubled, he was working
hard, but he wasn't with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand
was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch
Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short
rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his
eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having
a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the
deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing-he
had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to
do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.
And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I
had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician
and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own.
He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out
of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only
so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it
do everything.
And Sonny hadn't been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn't on much better terms
with his life, not the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered,
started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started
again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck. And the face I
saw on Sonny I'd never seen before. Everything had been burned out of it, and, at the same
time, things usually hidden were being burned in, by the fire and fury of the battle which
was occurring in him up there.
Yet, watching Creole's face as they neared the end of the first set, I had the feeling
that something had happened, something I hadn't heard. Then they finished, there was scattered
applause, and then, without an instant's warning, Creole started into something else, it was
almost sardonic, it was Am I Blue? And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play.
Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low, black man said
something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted,
sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then,
dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. Then they all came together again, and Sonny
was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face. He seemed to have found,
right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn't get over
it. Then, for a while, just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to be agreeing with him
that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues.
He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and
deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were
all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping
it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways
to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and
how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale
to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.
-James Baldwin