A professional saxophone and electric bass player, author, and Yale University professor, Veal will provide an analysis of a unique style of jazz music in his lecture.
The lecture is part of UNC music department’s Carolina Symposia in Music and Culture Series, a program run by graduate students seeking to bring diverse speakers to campus.
“We were looking for speakers that seemed really interesting and we hadn’t had someone come in recently who talked about popular music or music from Africa, and that’s something professor Veal has written well on,” said Ph.D. candidate in musicology William Robin.
“He does work on jazz, on blues, on the relationships between African American music and African music, and seemed to be a really engaging choice to bring to campus,” Robin said.
Veal has traveled the world giving lectures, but today marks his first time in Chapel Hill. He will discuss the research he plans to publish on famous jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and his development of ‘free jazz.’
“Coltrane’s late music is very controversial,” Veal said. “There is still a very strong difference of opinion of people that value that music and people that don’t value that music. I’m trying to clear away some of the emotionalism of the topic and look at what’s really happening inside the music.”
Veal said in his later years, Coltrane started what would later be called free jazz, which operates under different rules than traditional jazz. He works to translate this untraditional style into a musical language that works from spaces, shapes and surfaces.
“We don’t really have an analytical language of that music,” Veal said. “What I’m doing, in an egg shell, is throwing out ideas about how we can talk about this music to understand what’s going on.”
