Giant Steps (Deluxe Edition) [Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, Extra tracks]

Coltrane woodsheds for hours a day for weeks to prepare for this album of incredibly complex harmonies - some tunes at super fast tempos - and the great Tommy Flanagan on piano has to practically sight read them right out of the box and try to keep up. I felt bad for him for years over this embarrassment, because he's one of my favorites. (Check him out on Art Pepper's Straight Life for some great soulful and tasteful playing.) Anway, glad to get this off my chest! Coltrane should have given him more time to prepare for the studio session. Nevertheless, this album is worth a listen because of its historic value, as Coltrane takes the perfection his own playing to an almost impossible standard for anyone else to match, though not with as much feeling and emotion as one would find on most of his later albums. He was driven as a musician, and one can clearly hear the results and sense his excitement about finally being able to play his own music instead having to play Green Dolphin Street for the 1000th time with the Miles Davis Quintet.

Giant Steps strikes me as cold, distant, and soulless. Every six months I break it out again and I always have the same reaction: it just doesn't grab my heart. It is a very technically proficient record, but it's fire is not human, to me. I know many people love it, but to me there is something essential lacking here. I except Naima from this review. That track alone deserves five stars, but the rest of the record is cold and metallic, to me.

I consider this the first truly essential John Coltrane album, along with his work alongside Miles Davis on the seminal Kind of Blue. It is here that John Coltrane establishes himself as the unprecedent artist that he was. It is on Giant Steps that we find the first essential statement of Coltrane's musical personality.
This recording starts at a breakneck jazz tempo, and hardly lets up throughout the course of its seven tracks. Coltrane's saxaphone explodes through the speakers, in a barrage of notes and bright tones that convey the sheer electricity of all that is possible in jazz music.
This blizzard of sound would quickly grow tiresome, if it weren't for the subtle variations in composition. After the intensity of Giant Steps, Cousin Mary steps up and bounces a little more emphatically, letting Coltrane loosen up and take the groove to incredible heights.
Syeeda's Song Flute similarly finds a way to groove, with more moodiness and cool. The track Naima is the albums only quiet moment, letting Coltrane float his melody into the far reaches of a saxaphone's range, without flash, and with pure feeling. The album ends emphatically with Mr. P.C., showcasing the session musicians in its incredible bursts of drum solos and driving instrumentation.
You don't have to know the details of jazz to get this recording. What makes John Coltrane so special is his ability to communicate through sound, rendering reviews such as this useless. This is a great place to start building a Coltrane collection, or any jazz collection.