Reading Ascension: Intertextuality, Improvisation, and Meaning in Performance

Abstract

Feedback analysis has been a useful tool for ethnographers to get deeper into the contours of how expressive culture is meaningful for those involved in its production. This paper looks at how feedback analysis might work in the case of improvisation, where the cultural text generated is born of contingency, spontaneity, and ephemerality. I interview a group of musicians who participated in a performance of John Coltrane’s landmark work Ascension, a piece that has come to occupy a unique position in the canon of experimental jazz. In examining the performance (and its recording) as text, our interviews yield a plethora of readings that align with structural and poststructural modes of interpretation. In this case, feedback interviews function to elaborate understandings of the performed and interpreted text, but also illuminate the "extra-textual" dimensions of expressive culture that often remain deemphasized and hidden.