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 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.
ON MUSIC: LIVING SPACE, Michael Veal and Aqua lfe
Thursday, 7.4.2022
Haus der Kulturen der Welt | John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10 | 10557 Berlin
