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Living Space
John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital
Series: Music / Culture
Sales Date: 2024-04-09
Examines John Coltrane's "late period" and Miles Davis's "Lost Quintet" through the prisms of digital architecture and experimental photography
Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital fuses biography and style history in order to illuminate the music of two jazz icons, while drawing on the discourses of photography and digital architecture to fashion musical insights that may not be available through the traditional language of jazz analysis. The book follows the controversial trajectories of two jazz legends, emerging from the 1959 album Kind of Blue. Coltrane's odyssey through what became known as "free jazz" brought stylistic (r)evolution and chaos in equal measure. Davis's spearheading of "jazz-rock fusion" opened a door through which jazz's ongoing dialogue with the popular tradition could be regenerated, engaging both high and low ideas of creativity, community, and commerce. Includes 42 illustrations.
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION • CHAPTER TWO: FREE JAZZ AS SPATIAL PRACTICE: SPACE, SHAPE, SURFACE AND THE URBAN AS MODES OF JAZZ CONSCIOUSNESS • CHAPTER THREE: THE AFRICANIST GRID AND THE SPLINE AS MODES OF JAZZ CONSCIOUSNESS • CHAPTER FOUR: RECORDED SPACE AS A MODE OF JAZZ CONSCIOUSNESS • CHAPTER FIVE: LIVING SPACE: JOHN COLTRANE BETWEEN WORLDS • CHAPTER SIX: ELECTRICITY WAS JUST ANOTHER COLOR: MILES DAVIS BETWEEN WORLDS • CHAPTER SEVEN: "A LIQUID FEELING EMERGES"
MICHAEL E. VEAL (New York, NY) is Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music at Yale University. His books include Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, and Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat.
"A major and singular contribution to the literature on jazz from one of the foremost authorities of American music in the world. Because of the longevity, breadth, and unmatched impact of his scholarship on the academy and beyond, Veal's insights are always astonishing and illuminating. The layers of his expertise unfold in this book through an explosion of carefully argued original points and observations that will broaden the interdisciplinary questions we ask of jazz music and its figures."
~Guthrie Ramsey, author of Who Hears Here? On Black Music Pasts and Present
"Equal parts musical analysis, history lesson, and extended parable, Michael E. Veal's Living Space is a sublime rendering of the existential stakes around these epic but largely misrendered narratives of black aesthetic formulation. A profound decoding and subtly paradigm shifting rearticulation, Veal spins extrapolations as potent as the music itself."
~Arthur Jafa, award-winning American cinematographer
"In its careful attention to innovative arrangement, and devoted and generative derangement, Living Space hears space living in the music, hiding in plain black sight and song. As phono-material field and feel, where continuous variation and the intraplay of one and none just keep on raising sand and making waves, Miles and Trane are not entangled particles but a vibrant fabric Veal rides and wears with brilliant sensitivity."
~Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
"The beauty of this book is Veal's laser focus on jazz that has often been considered divisive music but is in reality revelatory and profound... A fascinating and complex study of the musical evolution of two legendary artists."
~Library Journal
Read excerpt from Living Space here -> Veal_Living-Space_excerpt