<i>Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital</i>, by Michael E. Veal

Michael E. Veal’s fourth monograph asks a provocative question: what happens when we hear free jazz, especially in the moment of its emergence, as science fiction? How, for Black American avant-gardists in the 1960s, did musical improvisation afford opportunities for both design and speculation, both “mathematical contemplation and cosmological reflection” (p. 8)? What analytical tools help us speak more intimately to the yearning for spiritual transcendence and (meta)physical exploration that animates Black radical sound during the American civil rights movement, decolonization, and the Space Age? Living Space explores the question of free jazz as science fiction by bringing frameworks from digital architecture and analog photography to bear on the careers of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. In doing so, the book critically remaps the interdisciplinary boundaries of jazz studies, unveiling a methodological apparatus that responds passionately to contemporary questions about the dovetailing and/or fracturing of music-theoretical, musicological, and ethnomusicological interests and values.1Living Space offers a clear and long-awaited historiographical intervention into jazz studies, proposing that the recorded archive of Coltrane’s late period (1965–67) and Davis’s Lost Quintet (1968–70) are better heard as “logical and organic extension[s]” (p. 6) of earlier aesthetic and sociopolitical exigencies in the two men’s lives. Veal notes jazz scholarship’s struggles to reconcile Coltrane’s harmonic innovations (e.g., the “Giant Steps” matrix) with the free-meter explorations of his late style; likewise, the Lost Quintet has eluded recognition in jazz’s stylistic evolution because of the fraught nature of its sonic archive, which remains “scattered among lo-fi audience recordings and captured radio broadcasts of equally low fidelity” (p. 9). In these respective senses, our understandings of Coltrane and Davis are “out of time” (p. 13) and “out of focus” (p. 16). Veal justifies his use of architectural and photographic theory thusly: where the former rejuvenates a “discourse of rhythm” (p. 13, emphasis original) in musicology, the latter’s focus on technological mediation and chance encounter embraces the idiosyncrasies of bootleg recordings as generative artifacts rather than obstacles to a pristine listening experience. For Veal, free meter functions as “a metaphor for the escape from earthly histories of racial and political oppression . . . and the distorted degeneration of recorded sound conjures the exotic atmospheres of other worlds” (p. 27). Across two extended essays comprising most of the book, these dual hermeneutic prisms—rhythm as postmodern architecture, distortion as postindustrial ambience—recuperate the rubato spacetime of Coltrane’s free meter and the electrically charged textures of Davis’s jazz rock as “sonic utopias” (p. 26) that propose sociomusical worlds otherwise.Veal’s methodology powerfully repurposes the visual-spatial thinking of architecture and the surrealist-aleatoric sensibilities of photography for close musical listening. He sets up this framework via three theoretical chapters preceding the Coltrane-Davis essays, stabilizing the often dizzying language of abstract design with candid reflections on his own intellectual trajectory: “I began to sense how beautiful it could be to narrate the structures of free jazz using [such] terms . . . Slopes. Splines. Curves. Rotations. Spirals” (p. 47, emphasis original). Paramount among these concepts is curvilinearity, a resolution of the “broken shapes and surfaces of postmodernist and deconstructive architecture” into a “language of smooth, undulating surfaces” (p. 68). Curvilinearity resituates Coltrane’s harmonic and rhythmic innovations within an impulse to bend or curve musical spacetime. Where Coltrane’s approach to pitch materials transfigured tonal space, his less-studied experiments with time, texture, and performing forces in works like Interstellar Space and Sun Ship signaled an aesthetic-spiritual-political exploration of altered consciousness whose rhythmic science (and metaspatial fiction) far exceeds the two-dimensional frameworks crowding musicology’s toolbox. Unlike the Time Unit Box System (TUBS), for instance, Veal’s theory of the “Africanist Grid” proposes a curved, three- and four-dimensional model of rhythm where free-meter improvisation is less a break with metered groove (as traditional jazz narratives would have it) than “a stretching or expansion of [such] preexisting relationships” (p. 72). The Africanist Grid aspires to a “unified field theory” (p. 74) of Black musical spacetime, outlining an acoustemological mode in which free jazz’s transformation of swing (rationally generated, linear time) into splines (intuitively generated, curved topology) articulates rhythmically the blend of mathematics and mysticism, of design and dreamwork, that Black radical improvisation ensounds.Meanwhile, photography accounts for the “eccentric spatialities” (p. 341) of bootlegs, whose distorted sonic profiles mediate our present-day listening encounters with jazz’s unofficial recorded history (what Veal calls its “alter-archive”), resonating transhistorically with the glitch aesthetics of hip hop, electronic dance musics, and science fiction itself. As a process of fortuitous capture, photography foregrounds Veal’s narration of musical processes in the Lost Quintet. Much like how the “errant chemistry” (p. 285) of analog film can impart an otherworldly patina that augments heterotopian subjectivity, the chemistry between Davis’s musicians burns—not just in the typical jazz sense that their vertiginous explorations of free meter and Rhodes-overridden textures “lift off” from terrestrial sound-space, but also in the photographic sense that their energies burn into and find their counterpart in the poetics of recorded format. “Their electric ethos of rhythmic flotation,” Veal writes, is “amplified by the glitched and corroded aesthetics of information floating in analog and digital transit” (p. 286). Look to the abyssal blacks and blown-out highlights of a Daido Moriyama image, then listen to the crush of propulsive jet flame that is Jack DeJohnette with Davis, or Pharoah Sanders alongside Coltrane—or, for that matter, contemplate Rashied Ali’s drumming on “Sun Ship” while examining the rippling topological examples that abound in the volume.Living Space 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. While readers may be challenged by the heady mix of poetics, memoir, biography, formal analysis, and theoretical play that enlivens its prose, they will find familiarity in the book’s self-admittedly “conservative” biographical form, as well as reflexive clarity in how its “sound studies/archival argument extends out of the jazz studies emphasis on discographical research and the spatial and photographic arguments broaden the concept of musical analysis” (p. 22). Also self-admittedly conservative is the project’s “male-centeredness” (p. 25), which Veal works to counter via the “centrality and contributions” of Alice Coltrane and Betty Davis. The question of women’s contributions to the Black radical sonic tradition, not to mention the reproduction of Black avant-masculine aesthetics made plain throughout Veal’s historicization, remains knotted in the volume. This may frustrate readers who seek a more decisive style analysis over the familiar historiographical interventive of acknowledging women for the forms of inspiration and liberation they afforded the men in their lives. Yet, Veal’s critique of the masculinist narratives (of “race, rage, and turbulence”) that overdetermine free jazz opens the possibility of hearing the “tenderness, romance, and sensuality that can also be felt flowing within its curvilinear contours” (p. 193). If anything, the limited affordances of a chronobiographical form directed at the titanic legacies of two men, rather than a fault of attention, generates this tension. One imagines future Coltrane- and Davis-oriented scholarship that seizes upon feminist-ecological frameworks, where jazz studies continues to reckon with Davis’s legacy as an abuser of women, and in which Veal’s suggestion of Black radical improvisation’s “resonan[ce] with another vector of liberation: the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its explosion of erotic energy into the public sphere” (p. 193) might be realized more fully.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” (p. 21). As such, the book stands as required reading for students of jazz and Black improvised traditions, historians of the Black Atlantic and Afrofuturism, and, more broadly, those working at the theoretical intersection of what Aldwyn Hogg Jr. calls “Black sonic technopoetics”2 and Alexander Weheliye’s “sonic Afro-modernity.”3 The clarity with which Veal asserts free jazz’s transhistorical significance, even while engaging with complex theoretical and extramusical ideas, also makes this a promising resource for graduate and undergraduate study. (Here, I am thinking about pedagogues at predominantly white institutions who seek to guide the creative and sociopolitical awakening of young improvisers—among whom “going to outer space” often hews more toward expressions of white, cishet, memecore-jazz-school homosociality than the tradition of politically grounded, scientific-spiritual experimentality that Veal describes.) Arriving on the crest of a new wave of scholarship that emphasizes the spatiality of Black musical practice4 and the global-postcolonial flows of Black American cultural production,5 Living Space expands and affirms geographer Katherine McKittrick’s famous axiom: that “Black matters are spatial matters.”6