Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz

Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital draws on the discourses of experimental photography and digital architecture in order to illuminate the music of two jazz icons. 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.

About the author

Michael E. Veal 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.

About the panelists

Farrah J. Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she also served as the inaugural Chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies. She is the author or editor of eight books including Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (Basic Books, 2013).

Robert O'Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for twenty-five years. The founder of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O'Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His edited volumes include The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz, History and Memory in African American Culture, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-editor), and the Barnes and Noble editions of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. For his production of a Smithsonian record set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Mark Rakatansky is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP and principal of Mark Rakatansky Studio. His work as an architect and writer focuses on the transformative capabilities of design. His projects include the Jakarta house Permana, the Brooklyn apartment Inner Liner, the headstone For Ira, the urban installation Open Stacks, the clock Roman Time, and the sound-work My Favorite "Favorite Things". He is the author of Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt (Architectural Association, 2012—which includes the essay “John Coltrane’s Sample and Scratch”), as well as the transmedial essays “The Transformations of Giulio Romano,” “Signifying Media: TheImprinting of Palladio,” and “‘His Conduct is Mischievous: Piranesi and Soane” (current and forthcoming on the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative website we-aggregate.org)

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a music historian, pianist, composer and author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003), and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (2013). Dr. Ramsey is co-author beside Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., with Melanie Zeck of The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs and the Ships of the African Diaspora (2017) and editor of Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (2020). He was editor for the series Music of the African Diaspora at the University of California Press for ten years and founding editor of the blog Musiqology.com.

Knar Abrahamyan (moderator) is Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University. She is a music scholar whose work examines the historical and political entanglements of cultural production. Her book project, Opera as Statecraft in Soviet Armenia and Kazakhstan, re-envisions Soviet music history by analyzing the power dynamics between the state and its ethnic and racial Others. It explores opera as a contested imperial space through which the Soviet state pursued colonial subjugation under the guise of cultural modernization. Abrahamyan has presented at major national and international conferences, and her work on Soviet music and politics appeared in the DSCH Journal and a collected volume, Analytical Approaches to 20th-Century Russian Music.