Customer Reviews

Giant Steps

5 star:		(78)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

I'm a simple man, I never took music classes or learned to read music or play an instrument, nor am I a pseudo-intellectual latte swigging baboon. With that said, I can't dazzle you all with fancy talk of time signatures and pentatonic scales. But I certainly know good music when I hear it, and John Coltrane is good, folks. If you're reading this, I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know, because Coltrane is required reading for any jazz fan. I just needed to put my praise in with everyone else though. Less than one minute after popping this cd in for the first time, I nearly puked in my pants(and that's a good thing for me)! I really love the sound of the saxophone, and Coltrane milks the sax for all it's worth.....and then some. I know the sax is fingernails on a chalkboard for some people, so I wouldn't recommend this to you if you're one of those folks. But if you like the squealing sax or just good uppity jazz music in general, this is the way to go. I know I'm a bit crude, and heavy on the comma, but I'm not gonna steer y'all wrong. Could so many positive reviewers be wrong?

My purpose here is not to simply add more superlatives to this legendary album's justly proud reputation -- it's everything and more that has been written about it of a praiseworthy nature; and you'll find plenty of praise here in these reviews (see especially the insightful words from Samuel Chell). But there remains one rather 'technical', and curiously long-lived misconception about GIANT STEPS which, as a serious student of jazz and avid music collector, myself (I have virtually all of Coltrane's impressive recorded output), I have wanted to correct
for years -- a misunderstanding which, I hasten to add, in NO way diminishes the brilliance and stature of this pivotal milestone in Coltrane's prolific career.

The problem is this: over the years, repeated references (and you'll find some of them in these reviews) to this classic album's being the ultimate representation of Coltrane's famous
'sheets of sound' phase, or technique, are simply mistaken. The so-called 'sheets of sound' effect that so startled early Coltrane audiences, in fact, emerged in his late '50s albums for Prestige -- not yet fully developed in the '56-'57 sides with the early Miles Davis Quintet (not even on that groundbreaking group's final recording, Miles' first for Columbia, 'ROUND ABOUT MIDNIGHT); but very well documented, even dominating, in Coltrane's prolific late '57-'58 period on Prestige, where the best examples of his 'sheets of sound' are to be found.

Technically, 'Trane's much-touted 'sheets of sound' amounted to his simply (!) shifting into a 'higher gear', at slow-to-medium-fast tempos -- essentially, playing more 16th-notes (i.e., 4 notes to every beat), instead of relying on the more typical
'8th-note orientation' (i.e., 2 notes to each beat) of most modern jazz solos from early be-bop onward. His solos during this period often used this technique to the point of letting those rapid-fire, 16th-note runs dominate his playing -- thus giving rise to the description, 'sheets of sound', or, sometimes, the more pejorative (and unjust) charge from critics of his just 'running scales'. Upon even cursory examination, Coltrane's solos on GIANT STEPS, on the contrary -- despite the prevalence of furious TEMPOS (which should not be confused with how many notes PER BEAT are being played!) actually do NOT contain a preponderance of the notorious 16th-note passages. In fact, the relatively spare use of his well-established, '4-to-the-beat' phrases on this 1960 classic might be viewed as one of the more remarkable aspects of this landmark entry in the great Coltrane legacy. His wonderfully agile, complex, and justly famous solos on such pieces as the title track, and even the demonically paced 'Countdown', in fact, consist of predominantly 8th notes; and, while the fast tempos, themselves, of course, may dictate a rapid torrent of notes, they still remain 'only'
2 to the beat -- not the daunting 4 per beat that define the 'sheets of sound' effect. While it may be suuggested that the generally fast tempos on GIANT STEPS are largely responsible for the relative absence of 16th-note runs throughout the album (as a practical 'impossibility', even for Coltrane!), it also is true that even the more moderately paced pieces -- normally more conducive to 'sheets of sound' flights -- are relatively free of that effect, compared to Coltrane's earlier work on Prestige.

At this album's date, the intense, multi-noted, and profoundly influential explorations that would largely define Coltrane's approach, even to the end, were yet to be applied in still other musical contexts, as this jazz giant's expansive music evolved from the 'interim' Atlantic years into the final, long Impulse! period of cutting-edge experimentation. The initial 'shock' of those earlier 'sheets of sound' would dissipate, and seem 'tame' by comparison -- or just 'inevitable' building blocks in the larger scheme of things ... and the legend would only grow.

This is a brilliant and classic record of course, but I'm deducting a star for the "bonus tracks". How about we stop MESSING with brilliant and classic records?

Re: "Golly. All my friends rant and rave about John Coltrane and how good he is. He just knows how to play really fast. His solos sound like he is making them up as he goes along. This guy needs to take some lessons from some real sax masters like Kenny G."

This is probably a joke, but just in case: Yeah, there is a word for "making up [solos] as [you go] along", and that word is J-A-Z-Z. This is a word Kenny G. needs desparately to discover the meaning of. (But first he needs to get a last name.)

Coltrane may still have been finding his voice to a degree when this was recorded. However NAIMA is one of the most hauntingly beautiful tunes ever recorded. Giant Steps is innovative and complex in it's simplicity. This is a great place to start if you are just getting into Coltrane's music. The bass playing of Paul Chambers is solid throughout and the other players are all very strong. What makes this cd a must own is the opportunity to hear Coltrane playing his own compositions and hearing his style developing. NAIMA alone is worth the price of this CD.Once you hear it you'll never get it out of your head.

This was my first introduction of legendary saxophonist John Coltrane. The only bad track is Naima. I wish Art Taylor got drum solos though. You can't go wrong with this cd.

It has some down points. We only listen to Vinyl, so that's what we have. Maybe those clicks, (new out of the sealed package), would be gone. But, this is a great sax player. A definately biased sound stage, but excellent. The recording is great for the era and his playing is flawless. Sax players will love it and people that like sax while be amazed.

Anyone that gives this a 4 should not have bought it.

It's understandable that many listeners may prefer to "Giant Steps" the more accessible earlier or later Coltrane. The former offers up his explorations within more familiar song forms--often the blues; the latter frequently makes the song secondary to the soloist's quest for a rapture beyond musical form altogether. "Giant Steps," on the other hand, is a musician's album. It set a new standard not only for saxophonists but for all players, requiring a combination of harmonic knowledge and technical facility that sent numerous musicians back to the woodshed for countless hours of practice. Without this album, and especially the title song and "The Countdown," Coltrane's early work would have seemed short of realizing its potential, and his later work would have been open to increasing suspicion about his actual credentials. Like Armstrong's cadenza on "West End Blues" and Bird's break on "Night in Tunisia," "Giant Steps" turned heads and gave a generation of musicians a whole new understanding of what jazz improvisation was capable of producing.

For the more technically minded, Trane's revision of dominant-tonic harmony is more impressive than his later embracing of modes as the sole platform for his scales and upper register probings. Suggested by the challenging bridge of Rodgers and Hart's "Have You Met Miss Jones," the sequence moves through a cycle of descending major thirds which, in the hands of most musicians, feels awkward and unnatural. Coltrane not only mastered the sequence but learned how to use it as a substitution in conventional harmonic settings. More impressively, he learned to execute it with an agility and naturalness that makes it possible for the listener to ignore the harmonic underpinning entirely and be swept up by the wave of emotion and melodic inventiveness.

"Giant Steps" is the main reason Sonny Rollins temporarily stopped playing in public. To his credit he came up with his own solution to the tyrannous sameness of much pop song harmony, but he was never able to come to terms with the harmonic complexity and technical innovations introduced by Coltrane. On the other hand, few have.

With 'Giant Steps' Coltrane takes a historical plunge, by recording the first album containing only his own compositions. After years picking up the best from the best (Dizzy, Davis, Monk) he brought into the studio some of the musicians that had accompanied him in the 'Kind of Blue' and 'Milestones' sessions a couple of years before (Paul Chambers on bass, Wynton Kelly on piano and James Cobb on drums), among others, to complete a set of songs that would show the world a bit more of what Coltrane's work was made of: a mix of honey and thunder, a balance between bliss and a certain degree of pain, when he delivers his powerful "sheets of sound" (as in the case of the title track or "Mr. P.C." -dedicated to fellow musician P. Chambers-) alongside a delicate ballad like the beautiful "Namia", lovingly named after his wife. Complementing the original works in this remastered version are alternate takes of five of the seven original tracks.

Coltrane would deliver a sound that would become synonimous with musical genius and exploration, spiritual sense and purpose, and inner struggle, in a sense. When you are in the presence of his music, you can't remain indifferent: it is bound to move you and if you let it creep inside your soul, it will change it inside out forever. Later down the road would come 'My Favorite Things', 'A Love Supreme' and many other incredible musical creations that took on a life of their own. Come take the step into Coltrane's solo works, with 'Giant Steps'.

With 'Giant Steps' Coltrane takes a historical plunge, by recording the first album containing only his own compositions. After years picking up the best from the best (Dizzy, Davis, Monk) he brought into the studio some of the musicians that had accompanied him in the 'Kind of Blue' and 'Milestones' sessions a couple of years before (Paul Chambers on bass, Wynton Kelly on piano and James Cobb on drums), among others, to complete a set of songs that would show the world a bit more of what Coltrane's work was made of: a mix of honey and thunder, a balance between bliss and a certain degree of pain, when he delivers his powerful "sheets of sound" (as in the case of the title track or "Mr. P.C." -dedicated to fellow musician P. Chambers-) alongside a delicate ballad like the beautiful "Namia", lovingly named after his wife.

Coltrane would deliver a sound that would become synonimous with musical genius and exploration, spiritual sense and purpose, and inner struggle, in a sense. When you are in the presence of his music, you can't remain indifferent: it is bound to move you and if you let it creep inside your soul, it will change it inside out forever. Later down the road would come 'My Favorite Things', 'A Love Supreme' and many other incredible musical creations that took on a life of their own. Come and take the step into Coltrane's solo works, with 'Giant Steps'.