Description: "A musical study of free jazz, specifically John Coltrane's controversial "late period" and Miles Davis's long-neglected "Lost Quintet," bringing jazz into dialogue with experimental currents in analysis of architecture and photography"--
Review Quotes:
"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
"Building on his sharp analysis of dub's electroacoustic innovations in Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Veal posits distortion as a generator of Black pasts and futures, bridging the gnarly bootlegs, the floating electroacoustic textures of the Lost Quintet and the studio psychedelia of Bitches Brew, while projecting forward to hip-hop's vinyl alchemy and its subsequent incorporation into live jazz. An inspired project."--Stewart Smith, The Wire
"Veal's methodology powerfully repurposes the visual-spatial thinking of architecture and the surrealist-aleatoric sensibilities of photography for close musical listening [the book] thus stages an exhilarating encounter between the photographers and architects of Veal's fascination, and the alter-archival recordings toward which his listening reads as a kind of love letter Living Space is written accessibly for multiple readerships, modeling a deeply intermedial approach to musical analysis and historiography that invites engagement from scholars and practitioners 'curious about sounding their way out of several decades of encrusted jazz conservatism.'"--Ken Tianyuan Ge, Journal of the American Musicological Society