Living Space

How can we talk about a music that has no clearly defined melody, no set tempo? In the 1960s and '70s, free jazz and fusion marked a stylistic caesura in music history and in the careers of artists Miles Davis and John Coltrane that was also confounding because there seemed to be no words to describe it. Michael E. Veal, an ethnomusicologist and musician, tries to grasp the complex pitch differences, patterns of movement and deviations as geometric shapes. According to Veal, jazz music is best accessed through a spatial vocabulary. Following monographs on Afrobeat and dub, the book Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital (forthcoming in 2022) describes the late music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis’s The Lost Quintet, viewing them through the analytically interpretive prisms of architecture and experimental photography. After the presentation of his book, Veal will perform with his twelve-piece Afrobeat band Aqua Ife.

With Michael E. Veal (bass, compositions), Eddie Allen (trumpet), Christian Crawford (trumpet), Cleave Guyton, Jr. (alto saxophone), Morgan Price (tenor saxophone), Courtney Wright (baritone saxophone), Ben Tyree (electric guitar), Jack Lawrence (electric guitar), Kwami Coleman (keyboards), Andy Algire (drum set), Baba Donald Eaton (congas, percussion), Alex Casimiro (sekere) and visuals by Anja Nit, moderated by Christine Kakaire