Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital

During a few short years in the 1960s and ’70s, Miles Davis and John Coltrane created some of their most challenging and controversial music. Veal (music, Yale Univ.; Tony Allen) explores this period in a remarkable way, combining musical, architectural, and photographic theory to present a poetic, multifaceted look at Davis’s and Coltrane’s “sonic utopias.” He embraces the sociopolitical aspects of their explorations in free or fusion jazz, reveals their music’s Afrocentric roots, and explains the importance of bootleg recordings as a historical record that capture the artists’ unedited, raw improvisation. 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; for instance, Coltrane’s late work has remained too experimental and difficult to digest for most listeners. The book is broken into five extensive essays that will mainly appeal to jazz scholars and Davis and Coltrane completists; they require a level of attention and musical knowledge worthy of these exceptional musicians.