Listening 3 - John Coltrane's Giant Steps

John Coltrane...the man, the myth, the legend. A church in California actually considered him God. This well known saxophonist and composer has made another jazz classic with this piece, Giant Steps.

It starts out fairly fast paced, playing the head twice.  Fairly basic.  Then his solo comes in.  This is where things go a little crazy.  John Coltrane is known for doing non-standard chord changes in his solos and Giant Steps is no exception to this idea.  He is really on his own plane, his notes going with the piano and bass yet still being on a different chord progression.  These different chord changes are known as Coltrane changes.  The piano tries to follow suit with the saxophones' mad solos, that were so full of scalar runs and jumps.  The piano dies down to more comfortable, regular chords and a more simple solo.  The sax comes back in to finish with a minor solo.  He follows that with another two rounds of the head, with a fermata on the last note and a fun little tag that calls back to his solos.

The instruments featured are what sounds to be either two tenors or a tenor sax and an alto (I've never had an ear for woodwinds), a piano, and a bass, not a bass guitar but a real bass, and a drum set that is constantly riding the high hat and gives a real straight forward beat.  The beat is fast, one has to work to snap on every other beat like any good beatnik can, but it is still in 4/4 time.  The head is in 12 bar blues, going AAB.

As a piece, it is fun to listen to, but not really something you could dance to, unless your dance style was as all over the place as the solo.  Coltrane uses hard accents on the head, so each note has a very strong impact.  Visually, it would look like someone dancing in a strobe light, every time it is a whole new note, new pose, but it still seems to flow together.

Coltrane went on to help start free jazz, which i do not prefer, but he will always live in my heart with his Bebop and hard Bop