"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.