What is the situation? Who is speaking and why is that important? What exactly is the narrator describing so powerfully? What of critical importance to the narrator and to Sonny is happening here ?

Sonny‘s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through. . . .I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. . . .I saw my little girl again . . . and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.