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In "Baldwin, Bebop, and 'Sonny's Blues,' "Pancho Savery argues that, "although there have been interesting analyses of `Sonny's Blues,' none of them has gotten to the specificities of the music and the wider cultural implications." As Savery points out, most of these analyses tend to focus on music as "the bridge the narrator crosses to get closer to Sonny" or to look at the blues through a somewhat superficial lens. Like Savery, I believe that the "kind and form of these particular blues make all the difference" (166). The story, though titled "Sonny's Blues," strongly supports a reading that it is jazz, and more specifically "Bebop," that Sonny plays in the culminating scene, a cultural context few critics seem to foreground in their treatment of the story.2 Perhaps it's possible then to see Baldwin's title as an invitation to question the very nature of the blues Sonny plays. Taking up Houston Baker's notion of the "blues matrix," in addition to the astute research of both Savery and Richard N. Albert, can help to illuminate Baldwin's treatment of the "metaphorical nature of the blues matrix" (Baker 10) and its relationship to jazz, as well as the cultural assumptions under which this treatment operates. And this, in turn, allows for a more "trained," as Baker might put it (8), interpretation of a text that is multivalent not only in its play of language and imagery, but also in its relationship to what the transition from the blues to jazz means in Harlem and in the larger context of urban African American culture. Baldwin's story ultimately signifies on, or repeats with a difference,3 the function of the blues as relating the history of Black culture in America in order to argue for a critical awareness among African Americans of the historical contexts of their own cultural forms.
"Sonny's Blues" deals not only thematically with the crossroads between the blues and jazz, but addresses the need for a new form of cultural narrative as a repository for the experiences of African Americans. When the narrator comes to understand his brother Sonny through the latter's apparent struggle to strike out into the deep, unexplored waters of jazz improvisation, the metanarrative quality of jazz is foregrounded; the "blues" Sonny plays are...