Description
Book SynopsisSimon Shaw-Miller is Chair of History of Art, University of Bristol, UK. He is an Honorary Associate and Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Trade ReviewShaw-Miller’s brilliant new volume is a virtuosic critical riff on improvisation as aesthetic principle and artistic practice. Productively entwining histories of jazz and abstraction in 20th-century visual art, this text is a revelatory account of modernism at its most playful and creative. * Daniel Grimley, Professor of Music, University of Oxford, UK *
In a wide-ranging and compelling argument, Shaw-Miller rethinks the theory and practice of improvisation in early-20th-century transatlantic culture and offers an essential account of the “jazz modernism” that continues to challenge the racial and experiential hierarchies of modernity. * Michael Hatt, Professor of History of Art, University of Warwick, UK *
Having amassed prodigious research, Simon Shaw-Miller is a terrific Orphic guide to the vast musical-visual territory that he fearlessly traverses. Even as he embraces the mutability of jazz as a category, Shaw-Miller offers a jazz paradigm for the visual arts that is sturdy and capacious enough to accommodate composition, execution, and reception in equal measure. * Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, & Photographs, Clark Art Institute, USA *
Table of ContentsIntroduction & Theoretical Preliminaries: Art, Abstraction and All That Jazz 1. The Sight and Sound of Nascent Jazz: Words, Definitions & Rags 2. Orphism and a New Tune I: Dance, Music, Painting 3. Orphism and a New Tune II: Words, Music, Image 4. Orphism in America: Art, Machines and Jazz Rhythm 5. Objects, Improvisation and Rhythm: Kandinsky, Duchamp and Beyond
