"On returning [to Miles' group] . . . I found Miles in the midst of another stage of his musical development. There was one time in his past that he devoted to multichorded structures. He was interested in chords for their own sake. But now it seemed that he was moving in the opposite direction to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs. He used tunes with free-flowing lines and chordal direction. This allowed the soloist the choice of playing chorally (vertically) or melodically (horizontally) . . . due to the direct and free-flowing lines in his music, I found it easy to apply the harmonic ideas that I had." John Coltrane "I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of of chords . . . there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Classical composers--some of them--have been writing this way for years, but jazz musicians seldom have." Miles Davis, as told to Nat Hentoff in 1958 "One day when Miles came back from a tour I said, 'Miles, how was the job?' and he said, 'It's fine. Coltrane played fifty choruses, Cannonball played forty-six and I played two.'" Gil Evans "A lot of the scalar material Coltrane was playing was Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Most of the reed and trumpet players played out of different violin books, and also scale books like [Carl] Czerny." Joe Zawinul Quotes excerpted from Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo Press 2000).
Miles Davis Kind of Blue Recorded March 2 and April 22, 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio Featuring Miles Davis (tr), John Coltrane (ts), Cannonball Adderley (as), Bill Evans (p), Paul Chambers (b), Jimmy Cobb (dr), and Wynton Kelly (p) on "Freddie Freeloader" only 1. So What 2. Freddie Freeloader 3. Blue in Green 4. All Blues 5. Flamenco Sketches "Wynton joined us just before I was going into the studio to make Kind of Blue, but I had already planned that album around the piano playing of Bill Evans, who had agreed to play on it with us. We went into the studio to record Kind of Blue on the first or second day of March 1959. We had the sextet of Trane, Jimmy Cobb, Paul, Cannon, myself, and Wynton Kelly, but he played on only one tune: 'Freddie Freeloader.' That song was named after this black guy I knew who was always seeing what he could get from you free, and he was always around the jazz scene. Bill Evans played on the rest of the tunes. "We made Kind of Blue at two recording sessions--one in March and the other one in April. In between, Gil Evans and I took a big orchestra and did a television show with a lot of the music on Miles Ahead. "Kind of Blue also came out of the modal thing I started on Milestones. This time I added some other kind of sound I remembered from being back in Arkansas, when we were walking home from church and they were playing these bad gospels. So that kind of feeling came back to me and I started remembering what that music sounded like and felt like. That feeling is what I was trying to get close to. That feeling had got in my creative blood, my imagination, and I had forgotten it was there. I wrote this blues that tried to get back to that feeling I had when I was six years old, walking with my cousin along that dark Arkansas road. So I wrote about five bars of that and I recorded it and added a kind of running sound into the mix, because that was the only way I could get in the sound of the finger piano. But you write something and then guys play off it and take it someplace else through their creativity and imagination, and you just miss where you thought you wanted to go. I was trying to do one thing and ended up doing something else." Miles Davis and Quincey Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (Simon & Schuster 2011).
I was listening to So What from the Bootleg Series Vol 6 in the car earlier. The tempos are so much faster and just don’t have the magical vibe the album has. Bill Evans was so influential on this album, everyone else was stellar. Can you get a perfect album ? I think even the 30th St Studios made a difference to the feel of this album.
Re "Freddie Freeloader": "Coltrane's solo kicks in with exclamation points. As precise a balance as [engineer Fred] Plaut may have achieved by arranging the band in the studio, he was unprepared for the startling power of Coltrane's tenor. 'Fred absolutely had to turn down the knob there,' commented [engineer Frank] Laico in listening to the master tape. Coltrane may well have crowded his microphone when his turn to solo arrived, but even at a distance he was known for being able to project strongly and possessing a powerful tone. . . . "Coltrane's 'Freddie Freeloader' solo shows a marked increase in attention to mood and the horizontal aspect of the music--melody and rhythm, rather than the harmonic gymnastics of the past. 'I want to be more flexible where rhythm is concerned . . . most of my experimenting has been in the harmonic form. I put time and rhythms to one side, in the past,' Coltrane admitted in an autobiographical sketch for Down Beat in 1960. The result on Kind of Blue is a more reflective tenor sound, wholly appropriate to the restrained blues of 'Freeloader.' "Cannonball follows Coltrane with a sax-to-sax handoff that reveals the degree to which Coltrane's more free-form style had affected him. 'Trane had an extremely light, fluid sound and my alto sound has always been influenced by the tenor so it was sometimes difficult to tell when one instrument stopped and the other started,' Cannonball recalled. (Conversely, it is no surprise that Coltrane himself had initially been an alto player.) 'It sounded like a continual phrase.' "The two saxophonists had perfected the trick over an abundance of gigs together by 1959. But not all jazz listeners were impressed by Coltrane's growing effect on Adderley. 'Coltrane's playing has apparently influenced Adderley,' complained a Down Beat reviewer of the sextet's Newport Jazz Festival performance the previous summer. 'The latter's playing indicated less concern for melodic structure than he has illustrated in the past. . . .' "Another reason for their similarity may well have been their backgrounds: both saxmen began their careers steeped deeply in the blues. Coltrane toured with Texas also saxophonist and blues singer Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson's big band in 1948 and '49, while Adderley, commenting on the Fort Lauderdale group he co-led with his brother Nat, admitted: 'We were strongly influenced by Louis Jordan, Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson, blues bands like that.' Notably, his bebop-inspired runs on 'Freeloader' resonate with a strong honky-tonk vibe." Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, pp. 106-07 (Da Capo Press 2000).
Re "So What": "'That's another thing,' [Herbie] Hancock points out. 'The melody is in the bass. How many people had done that before? There were some songs--'Two Bass Hit,' some Jimmy Blanton numbers [like 'Jack the Bear' with Duke Ellington]. But there were very few things where the bass player plays the melody.' Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, p. 115 (Da Capo Press 2000). "In contrast to Miles' back-of-the-beat feel, Coltrane's and Cannonball's solos on 'So What' restlessly explore a new chord-free vista. Coltrane's solo works in fragments, urged on at one point by a shower of arpeggiated chords from Evans. Coltrane's concentration is audible: a pause occurs before the modal shift, then a new burst of energy as he launches into a new improvised line." Id. at 116.
Re "Blue in Green": "Coltrane finds a rhythmic middle ground between Davis and Evans, playing in a slow, deliberate tempo. His early love of Lester Young's light and airy feel is conjured to opportune effect in his brooding, fleeting statement." Id. at 120.
Re "Flamenco Sketches": "If Miles's solo on 'So What' is universally acknowledged as one of Kind of Blue's improvisational high points, Coltrane's on 'Sketches' must be celebrated for its emotional depth and subtlety. With hushed, tender nuance and a loose-knit approach prefiguring the spiritual intensity of his future recordings as a leader, he ranges from breezy and buoyant to somber, then bittersweet and melancholy, momentarily playing off the tune's plaintive Spanish sonority. It is impossible to be unaffected by his pristine passion." Id. at 140.
"Miles closed his Birdland engagement on April 29. A week later John Coltrane entered the studio to record the music for Giant Steps. Following so closely on the heels of the recording of Kind of Blue, the synchronicity seems almost scripted; very rarely do two flashes of connected brilliance occur in such short order (Atlantic would release Steps in 1960). Though divergent in musical style and execution--Steps was the result of much compositional trial and error and multiple takes--both albums resulted from a common intensity and drive to explore new musical territory. "Giant Steps stands as a personal leap forward for the tenor man, a declaration of musical independence foreshadowing his departure from Davis's group to form his own unit. In the album's liner notes, Coltrane revealed that his creative inspiration derived from a tireless spirit of self-education: 'I sit there and run over chord progressions and sequences, and eventually, I usually get a song--or songs--out of each little musical problem.' Like Evans and Davis, he was searching for a personal balance of the emotional and technical aspects of jazz: 'I'm worried that sometimes what I'm doing sounds just like academic exercises, and I'm trying more and more to make it sound prettier.' "The Miles Davis Sextet returned to the road the day after Coltrane's second session . . . . Coltrane, offered a lucrative gig of his own back in New York, quit the band while in L.A. Though he would return intermittently for a few New York appearances, one European tour, and one more recording session, Coltrane stayed on only long enough for Jimmy Heath, his replacement and old friend from Philadelphia, to arrive." Id. at 160-61.
Although ranking solos is an inherently subjective and perhaps arbitrary undertaking, a writer for popmatters.com had this to say in naming Trane's solo in "Blue in Green" his #2 best solo: "When one thinks of Coltrane on the saxophone, one most likely thinks of flights of technical brilliance that leave one breathless. This is understandable, since Trane no doubt played a lot of notes during his career. However, he was also one of the greatest melodists in the history of the music. Never did his abilities to construct a beautiful melody shine through more than on "Blue in Green", the most sublime, gorgeous track on Miles Davis' landmark 1959 record Kind of Blue. Trane's solo is short, but sweet. The chord changes to "Blue in Green" are complex, often shifting modalities and moods. Coltrane manages to construct a simple melody amongst all the harmonic complexity, one that is relentlessly sing-able. I often go to "Blue in Green" when I experience major events in my life, whether positive or negative. It always seems to speak to my current emotional state, and Coltrane's sensitive solo deserves a lot of credit for the song's power." https://www.popmatters.com/10-best-john-coltrane-solos-2495891525.html?rebelltpage=2#rebelltitem2 Which is particularly striking, given that Coltrane nearly didn't play on the tune. As recounted in Ashley Kahn's book (at p. 118), this was to be a quartet performance of Miles, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, until Miles invited Coltrane to play at the last second. Adderley sat out, as planned. As heard on the masters, Irving Townsend says, "Just you four guys on this, right Miles?" He responds, "Five . . . No, why don't you play?"
John Coltrane Giant Steps Recorded May 4 and 5, and December 2, 1959 Released January 27, 1960 With John Coltrane (ts), Tommy Flanagan (p), Paul Chambers (b), Art Taylor (dr) Except for "Naima": replace Flanagan with Wynton Kelly and Taylor with Jimmy Cobb 1. Giant Steps 2. Cousin Mary 3. Countdown 4. Spiral 5. Syeeda's Song Flute 6. Naima 7. Mr. P.C. "Trane's first genuinely iconic record." The Penguin Guide to Jazz (Core Collection selection). 2004 Library of Congress National Recording Registry selection. Nat Hentoff's liner notes: Along with Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane has become the most influential and controversial tenor saxophonist in modern jazz. He is becoming, in fact, more controversial and possibly more influential than Rollins. While it's true that to musicians especially, Coltrane's fiercely adventurous harmonic imagination is the most absorbing aspect of his developing style, the more basic point is that for many non-musician listeners, Coltrane at his best has an unusually striking emotional impact. There is such intensity in his playing that the string of adjectives employed by French critic Gérard Brémond in a Jazz-Hot article on Coltrane hardly seem at all exaggerated. Brémond called his playing "exuberant, furious, impassioned, thundering." There is also, however, an extraordinary amount of sensitivity in Coltrane's work. Part of the fury in much of his playing is the fury of the search, the obsession Coltrane has to play all he can hear or would like to hear -- often all at once -- and yet at the same time make his music, as he puts it, "more presentable." He said recently, "I'm worried that sometimes what I'm doing sounds like just academic exercises, and I'm trying more and more to make it sound prettier." It seems to me he already succeeds often in accomplishing both his aims, as sections of this album demonstrate. This is the first set composed entirely of Coltrane originals. John has been writing since 1948. He was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, September 23, 1926. His father played several instruments, and interested his son in music. At 15, John learned E-flat alto horn and clarinet, and in high school, he switched to tenor. He studied in Philadelphia at the Granoff Studios and the Ornstein School of Music, became a professional at 19, and played in a Navy band based in Hawaii from 1945-46. From 1947-49, he worked with Joe Webb (Big Maybelle was in the same entourage), King Kolax, Eddie Vinson and Howard McGhee. Charlie Parker had become a dominant influence on his playing. He was on alto with the Dizzy Gillespie band in 1949, and after Dizzy disbanded, John returned to Philadelphia, discouraged and trying to find his own way in music. From 1952-53, he was with Earl Bostic, and then played with Johnny Hodges, Jimmy Smith, and Bud Powell. He first joined Miles Davis from 1955-56. Miles regards Coltrane and Rollins as the two major modern tenors. "I always liked Coltrane," Miles said recently. "When he was with me the first time, people used to tell me to fire him. They said he wasn't playing anything. They also used to tell me to get rid of Philly Joe Jones. I know what I want though. I also don't understand this talk of Coltrane being difficult to understand. What he does, for example, is to play five notes of a chord and then keep changing it around, trying to see how many different ways it can sound. It's like explaining something five different ways. And that sound of his is connected with what he's doing with the chords at any given time." Miles encouraged Coltrane and also stimulated his harmonic thinking. In terms of writing as well, John feels he's learned from Miles to make sure that a song "is in the right tempo to be its most effective. He also made me go further into trying different modes in my writing." After two years with Miles, there was a period in 1957 with Thelonious Monk that Coltrane found unusually challenging. "I always had to be alert with Monk," he once said, "because if you didn't keep well aware all the time of what was going on, you'd suddenly feel as if you'd stepped into an empty elevator shaft." Coltrane worked briefly with the Red Garland quintet, then rejoined Miles, and has been with him ever since. He has nothing of his own in the Davis book at present, but he has devoted more and more of his time to composing. He is mostly self-taught as a writer, and generally starts his work at the piano. "I sit there and run over chord progressions and sequences, and eventually, I usually get a song -- or songs -- out of each little musical problem. After I've worked it out on the piano, I then develop the song further on tenor, trying to extend it harmonically." Coltrane tries to explain what drives him to keep stretching the harmonic possibilities of improvisation by saying, "I feel like I can't hear but so much in the ordinary chords we usually have going in the accompaniment. I just have to have more of a blueprint. It may be that sometimes I've been trying to force all those extra progressions into a structure where they don't fit, but this is all something I have to keep working on. I think too that my rhythmic approach has changed unconsciously during all this, and in time, it too should get as flexible as I'm trying to make my harmonic thinking." In her analysis of Coltrane's style in the November and December, 1959, issues of The Jazz Review, pianist Zita Carno pointed out that Coltrane's range "is something to marvel at; a full three octaves upward from the lowest note obtainable on the horn (concert A-flat) . . . There are a good many tenor players who have an extensive range, but what sets Coltrane apart from the rest of them is the equality of strength in all registers, which he has been able to obtain through long, hard practice. His sound is just as clear, full and unforced in the topmost notes as it is down in the bottom." She describes his tone as "a result of the particular combination of mouthpiece and reed he uses plus an extremely tight embouchure" and calls it "an incredibly powerful, resonant and sharply penetrating sound with a spine-chilling quality." Of the tunes, Coltrane says of "Giant Steps" that it gets its name from the fact that "the bass line is kind of a loping one. It goes from minor thirds to fourths, kind of a lop-sided pattern in contrast to moving strictly in fourths or in half-steps." Tommy Flanagan's relatively spare solo and the way it uses space as part of its structure is an effective contrast to Coltrane's intensely crowded choruses. "Cousin Mary" is named for a cousin of Coltrane who is indeed called Mary. The song is an attempt to describe her. "She's a very earthy, folksy, swinging person. The figure is riff-like and although the changes are not conventional blues progressions, I tried to retain the flavor of the blues." "Countdown's" changes are based in large part on "Tune Up," but against that, Coltrane uses essentially the same sequence of minor thirds to fourths that characterizes "Giant Steps." His solo here, and in the others as well, illustrates Zita Carno's point that Coltrane, for all he's trying to express in any given solo, has a remarkable sense of form. "Syeeda's Song Flute" has a particularly attractive line and is named for Coltrane's 10-year-old daughter. "When I ran across it on the piano," he says, "it reminded me of her because it sounded like a happy, child's song." The tender "Naima" -- an Arabic name -- is also the name of John's wife. "The tune is built," Coltrane notes, "on suspended chords over an E♭ pedal tone on the outside. On the inside -- the channel -- the chords are suspended over a B♭ pedal tone." Here again is demonstrated Coltrane's more than ordinary melodic imagination as a composer and the deeply emotional strength of all his work, writing and playing. There is a "cry" -- not at all necessarily a despairing one -- in the work of the best of the jazz players. It represents a man's being in thorough contact with his feelings, and being able to let them out, and that "cry" Coltrane certainly has. "Mr. P.C." is Paul Chambers who provides excellent support and thoughtful solos on the record as a whole and whom Coltrane regards as "one of the greatest bass players in jazz. His playing is beyond what I could say about it. The bass is such an important instrument, and has so much to do with how a group and a soloist can best function that I feel very fortunate to have had him on this date and to have been able to work with him in Miles' band so long." Tom Dowd's engineering, incidentally, has caught Paul's sound as well as it's ever been heard on records, and for an insight into the importance of the bass's function, it might be valuable to go through the record once, paying attention primarily to Paul. Also worth noting is the steady, generally discreet drumming of Arthur Taylor and Jimmy Cobb throughout. What makes Coltrane one of the most interesting jazz players is that he's not apt to ever stop looking for ways to perfect what he's already developed and also to go beyond what he knows he can do. He is thoroughly involved with plunging as far into himself and the expressive possibilities of his horn as he can. As Zita Carno wrote, "the only thing to expect from John Coltrane is the unexpected." I'd qualify that dictum by adding that one quality that can always be expected from Coltrane is intensity. He asks so much of himself that he can thereby bring a great deal to the listener who is also willing to try relatively unexplored territory with him.
Having gone through the exercise of putting this thread together and listening in chronological order to Coltrane's recordings, I can confidently say there's nothing like Giant Steps in Coltrane's discography before it. There were rumors among his contemporaries that he'd been working on these compositions for years before recording. I play some instruments and have a modicum of education in music theory, but just enough to be dangerous in this discussion. I'm going to let Vox break down for me just how revolutionary the composition "Giant Steps" is.
For more information on Coltrane's Circle of Fourths/Fifths and how he modulated around it, see: Way of Seeing Coltrane John Coltrane's Tone Circle Coltrane changes - Wikipedia And this is a nice visualization of Coltrane's Circle of Fifths/Fourths, using the newly released tune from Both Directions at Once, though it's not entirely accurate and best used for illustrative or artistic purposes:
I love this passage from the much-discussed Quincy Jones interview: Is there an example from the work you did, maybe with Michael, which illustrates what you’re talking about? Yeah, the best example of me trying to feed the musical principles of the past — I’m talking about bebop — is “Baby Be Mine.” [Hums the song’s melody.] That’s Coltrane done in a pop song. Getting the young kids to hear bebop is what I’m talking about. Jazz is at the top of the hierarchy of music because the musicians learned everything they could about music. Every time I used to see Coltrane he’d have Nicolas Slonimsky’s book. Yeah, he was famously obsessed with the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. That’s the one you’re talking about, right? That’s right. You’re bringing up all the good subjects now! Everything that Coltrane ever played was in that thesaurus. In fact, right near the front of that book, there’s a 12-tone example — it’s “Giant Steps.” Everyone thinks Coltrane wrote that, he didn’t. It’s Slonimsky. That book started all the jazz guys improvising in 12-tone. Coltrane carried that book around till the pages fell off. When Coltrane started to go far out with the music — “Giant Steps.” Even further out, though, like on Ascension — You can’t get further out than 12-tone, and “Giant Steps” is 12-tone. But when he was playing atonally — No, no, no. Even that was heavily influenced by Alban Berg — that’s as far out as you can get. Quincy Jones on the Secret Michael Jackson and the Problem With Modern Pop
One thing I can think of off the top of my head that I recall without listening anew is that I always thought it was cool in “Countdown” how it’s kinda like a reversal of your usual jazz form and starts with soloing and ends with the head. I may be misremembering, so correct me if I’m wrong, it starts off with Trane, or maybe Trane and Elvin, and then the other instruments enter one at a time until the whole band is finally going when it kicks into the head and I’m always like and holding on for dear life when that head drops. Ridiculous.
Also worth a read, explaining why Quincy Jones was not quite right when he referred to "Giant Steps" as 12-tone: Why Giant Steps is not 12-tone – Dan Reitz Dot Blog
I'll listen for that again, though it's Art Taylor on that tune. Elvin Jones hadn't yet joined Trane's group.
I’m enjoying the Davis/Coltrane The Final Tour Copenhagen March 24, 1960 red vinyl I picked up last year at Barnes and Noble. Great concert and one of the quietest vinyl pressings I own
Thanks for turning me on to Earl Bostic through this thread. What an almost absurdly virtuosic player he was!
I was thinking about this yesterday when @chervokas posted this video (the one above, “The Most Feared Song In Jazz, Explained”) about the tune “Giant Steps” in the other jazz thread, the bit at about 1:30 where they start talking about the difficulty of the tune and start using Tommy Flanagan’s solo to illustrate this. I thought it odd yesterday what they were saying because I had recalled that he turned out a pretty killing solo. I just now put the tune on and listened a few times (I also have the full band transcription) and, while I like the video as a whole for how it explains the concept of the changes, I pretty much flat out disagree with that part about Flanagan. I do agree though that he probably was holding on for dear life, but, nevertheless, if it is true that JC brought this chart into the studio for the session and said here’s the tune we’re doing and it’s fast as lightning, then I’d say that Flanagan, and PC and AT, absolutely slayed it. Now, precisely why I don’t like that part of the video is that the narrator goes with this idea, which is true, that the tune is difficult and complex but makes a statement that is just not true and then selectively chooses a part of Flanagan’s solo that conveniently fits the narrative. Around that 1:30 spot, she says that there is a moment in the recording that demonstrates how hard the tune is and that it happens when Tommy Flanagan “starts his solo.” Then a clip of the music is played that is from the last 6 bars of his third chorus, not the start, of his solo and which has 3 short single note phrases interspersed with rests where the first phrase is followed by 6 beats of rest, the 2nd with 2 beats of rest, and after the 3rd he switches to comping. So, when you listen to it in this context, it does sound like “yeah, wow, he’s really struggling”. However, while Flanagan’s solo is 4 choruses, only the first 3 choruses are actual soloing while the 4th is just comping. So, if you listen to his solo, from the start, he is actually pretty much killing it for those 3 choruses. Of course, compared to JC (who basically fills up all the space in a whopping 10 choruses for his first solo) it is a bit choppy occasionally, but I think that what may have happened towards the end of that 3rd chorus, the part which was used in the video and that does sound the most choppy, is that Flanagan probably intended to wrap up his solo at that point but there was a miscue, JC didn’t come in, and Flanagan just continued to comp rather than resuming his solo. Naturally, I can’t say for sure, but that’s just an alternative theory I’m proposing to the “poor Tommy Flanagan couldn’t keep up” narrative.
