Jazz Belectured

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 Frontieres du Jazz (1930). Critic Goffin both looked and sounded authoritative. "Tiger Rag" said he, "is the second tableau of a quadrille I used to dance to in Brussels as a boy." Phonograph records illustrated his points.

In later lectures the professor promised to discourse on the cakewalk, ragtime, black jazz, orchestral boogie-woogie, now & then with the collaboration of such great swingsters as Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw, W. C. Handy.

Robert Goffin's bounding enthusiasm has found many an outlet. Besides being a leading criminal lawyer of Brussels (until the Nazi invasion), he has authored books on legal finance, spies, gastronomy, rats, spiders, eels. He collaborated on a play with Maurice Maeterlinck. Jazz, at first his passionate hobby, is now his profession. For him there is only one worth-while kind: hot, improvised jazz. "You must hear Lombardo," he says, "to have a notion of what not to do in jazz."

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