IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital
by Michael E. Veal
‎Wesleyan University Press, 2024

[Publication date: April 9, 2024]

Examines John Coltrane's "late period" and Miles Davis's "Lost Quintet" through the prisms of digital architectureand experimental photography

Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital fuses biography and style history in order to illuminate the music of two jazz icons, while drawing on the discourses of photography and digital architecture to fashion musical insights that may not be available through the traditional language of jazz analysis. The book follows the controversial trajectories of two jazz legends, emerging from the 1959 album Kind of Blue. Coltrane's odyssey through what became known as "free jazz" brought stylistic (r)evolution and chaos in equal measure. Davis's spearheading of "jazz-rock fusion" opened a door through which jazz's ongoing dialogue with the popular tradition could be regenerated, engaging both high and low ideas of creativity, community, and commerce. Includes 42 illustrations.

 

REVIEWS:

 

"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

"A major and singular contribution to the literature on jazz from one of the foremost authorities of American music in the world. Because of the longevity, breadth, and unmatched impact of his scholarship on the academy and beyond, Veal's insights are always astonishing and illuminating. The layers of his expertise unfold in this book through an explosion of carefully argued original points and observations that will broaden the interdisciplinary questions we ask of jazz music and its figures."―Guthrie Ramsey, author of Who Hears Here? On Black Music Pasts and Present

"Equal parts musical analysis, history lesson, and extended parable, Michael E. Veal's Living Space is a sublime rendering of the existential stakes around these epic but largely misrendered narratives of black aesthetic formulation. A profound decoding and subtly paradigm shifting rearticulation, Veal spins extrapolations as potent as the music itself."―Arthur Jafa, award-winning American cinematographer

"In its careful attention to innovative arrangement, and devoted and generative derangement, Living Space hears space living in the music, hiding in plain black sight and song. As phono-material field and feel, where continuous variation and the intraplay of one and none just keep on raising sand and making waves, Miles and Trane are not entangled particles but a vibrant fabric Veal rides and wears with brilliant sensitivity."―Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

MICHAEL E. VEAL (New York, NY) is Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music at Yale University. His books include Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, and Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat.

Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing
by Nigel C. Gibson
‎ Polity,  2024

[Publication date:  June 17, 2024]

Revolutionary humanist and radical psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was one of the greatest Black thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Martinique and known for his involvement in the Algerian liberation movement, his seminal books Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are widely considered to be cornerstones of anti-colonial and anti-racist thought.

In this essential introduction to Fanon’s remarkable life and philosophy, Nigel C. Gibson argues that Fanon’s oeuvre is essential to thinking about race today. Connecting Fanon’s writing, psychiatric practice, and lived experience in the Caribbean, France, and Africa, Gibson reveals (with startling clarity) his philosophical commitments and the vision of revolution that he stood for. Despite his untimely death, the revolutionary pulse of Fanon’s ideas has continued to beat ever more strongly in the consciousness of successive revolutionary generations, from the Black Panthers and the Black Power to Black Lives Matter.

As Fanon’s thought comes alive to new activists thinking about their mission to “humanize the world,” Gibson reminds us that that Fanon’s revolutionary humanism is fundamental to all forms of anti-colonial struggle, including our own.

This book compels readers to step into ‘the glare of history’s floodlights.’ Nigel Gibson expertly explores Fanon’s philosophy of liberation and makes a riveting plea for us to listen to Fanon across the ages. Each generation can and should find its revolution ‘no longer in future heaven,’ but within their own collective consciousness.”
--Jane Anna Gordon, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement

“Gibson excavates Fanon like no other scholar. This book is a truly great read, and a masterful rendering of how and why Fanon keeps coming to life during revolutionary turning points in ever more diverse and comprehensive ways.”
--Lou Turner, co-author of Frantz Fanon, Soweto and Black American Thought

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Nigel C. Gibson is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, Boston, and an expert in the fields of Africana thought and postcolonialism. He is recognized as one of the leading scholars on Frantz Fanon and has authored numerous books on Fanon’s thought. An activist and scholar he was born in London and was an active in the 1984-1985 Miners' Strike. While in London he also met South African exiles from the Black Consciousness Movement and, in conversation with the exiles, developed some influential academic work on the movement. He later moved to the United States where he worked with Raya Dunayevskaya in the Marxist Humanism movement, studied with Edward Said and became an important theorist of Frantz Fanon on whom he has written extensively. Gibson's work has been widely influential in South Africa where it is often cited by academics and activists. In recent years he has often written and spoken on the South African shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. He is a member of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and has addressed the United Nations.

He was previously the Assistant Director of African Studies at Columbia University and a Research Associate in African-American Studies at Harvard University.

In 2009 he was awarded the Fanon prize by the Caribbean Philosophy Association. According to the association "Gibson has set a high standard in Fanon studies and historically-informed political thought on Africa and the Caribbean."