Preview of The Hot Jazz Trio Summary:

The Hot Jazz Trio is composed of three short pieces. The most ambitious one, "Django Rheinhardt Played the Blues" is set in Paris in the first part of the twentieth century and is Kotzwinkle's fullest rendering of his idea of Europe. He pictures it as a land laden with the accumulated history of many centuries; so much has occurred on every inch of ground that the weight of circumstance has literally pressed time into folds so that there seems to be a series of parallel strata running throughout the terrain.

The story begins in the Paris of Andre Breton, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, and accordingly, it is governed not by the conventional Newtonian physics of standard realistic fiction, but by the precepts of surrealism which include a fracturing of time, space, and personality, as well as a Dada-inspired lunacy.