There could be ten seconds where everyone is connected and you feel really joined by the same thread and it’s really magical

International audienceWe collected musicians’ discourse about their practices of joint improvisation within listening sessions that we conducted with 3 established free jazz trios a few days after the recording of their concert performance. In keeping with the self-confrontation method of Theureau (2003),we asked the musicians to exchange collectively about what they could remember of their experience and feelings on stage, and what they thought about the musical result while listening to the recording.We will present a multi-layer analysis of these verbal interactions. Our methods combine discourse and interaction analysis (Mondada & Dubois, 1995; Sawyer 2001) with semantic-prosodic analysis (Cloiseau, 2007). In addition to shedding light on joint improvisation in music, this linguistic and cognitive approach also investigates joint improvisation in discourse.We will illustrate our analysis with examples where the trios (re)build what happened during the performance based on their individual memory and through recurrent collective listening. We will focus both on deep interpersonal synchronization moments and on problematic moments where the improvisers identified discrepancies between their interpretations of each one’s actions on stage and their retrospective understanding of the musical event.To involve musicians in group discussions building on a playback of their own performance allows us to draw out collaborative reconstructions of their experience (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), and thus contributes to a better understanding of verbal and musical improvisation processes. This study takes place in a wider research and creation project that involves outstanding free improvisers from the jazz scene of New York City (Pras, 2015). It extends a first study based on individual interviews about free improvisation practices, for which we have developed the multi-layer analysis that we present here (Cance et al., 2014)