Shaw-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