Eric Nisenson

Eric Nisenson chronicled jazz through musical biography, close listening, and social history. Ascension follows saxophonist John Coltrane's development from hard bop toward increasingly open and exploratory forms, treating recordings as stages in an artistic and spiritual search. Da Capo's edition presents the book as biography, jazz history, social history, and listener's guide, a combination that lets Nisenson connect Coltrane's changing sound with the ensembles, ideas, and historical pressures around him. The New York Public Library catalogs it as a biography of an American jazz musician. Nisenson also wrote The Making of Kind of Blue and a major biography of Miles Davis, whom he knew personally. His approach in Ascension is admiring but analytical: individual albums and performances matter not as isolated landmarks, but as evidence of a musician continually revising his language. The result gives readers a chronological life while encouraging them to hear that development through close listening.