Hunched behind his lecturer's desk at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, the speaker introduced his subject as a product of the subconscious ("the earliest form of surrealism"), argued its artistic kinship to the creations of Authors Walt Whitman, Maeterlinck, James Joyce, Painters Renoir, Salvador Dali, Henri Rousseau ("the customs inspector who created things of beauty without knowing just how"). He was talking about jazz.
The lecturer was Robert Coffin, a hulking, fat-jowled Belgian swing critic known to hot jazz devotees as author of the first serious book on the subject: Aux Frontières...
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