The Coltrane changes are lovely, but if you slow them down they aren't substantially more difficult than other Jazz changes from that era. What makes Giant Steps so challenging is mainly the tempo.
Tommy Flanagan put out a recording of Giant Steps with his own trio in the 1980s. Having had enough time by then to woodshed the changes, his improvs are exquisite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PWynH-CEc
Sure. It's also true that if you speed anything up enough it becomes impossible for anybody to play. But neither of those reductio ad absurdum observations tells us much.
The point is that this Vox presentation and many other articles on the Coltrane changes present them as so revolutionary that improvisers struggle, but on its own that's not true.
There are records which predate Giant Steps which are equally harmonically interesting and challenging and which similarly modulate through many key centers, like Con Alma [1] by Dizzy Gillespie from 1954 or Lush Life [2] by Billy Strayhorn from 1948.
What Coltrane did with Giant Steps was akin to calling for Lush Life at 300 beats per minute.
It's also just that they're weird and not terribly melodic. They're great, but it's not like some jazz standard from a musical where you just kind of feel where it's going after hearing it a few times.
This makes it a perpetual challenge for me, and I've never mastered it. Doing something sensible on double bass is enough of a challenge without it having to be at some blistering tempo.
On more straightforward changes, I can usually internalize the melody and harmonic motion well enough to form a sensible solo, but I've got my limits. Fortunately the era of "Giant Steps" getting called on every gig has more or less passed.
The Coltrane Changes pattern of descending through major keys via major thirds is actually used at moderate tempo in the bridge of the Rogers/Hart tune Have You Met Miss Jones? ... which is a standard from a musical haha.
But I acknowledge that in that context, it's an "out there" harmonic adventure which builds tension, to be released when the final section harps on the tonic.
I still think that it's mostly the tempo that makes Giant Steps feel alien. Modulating through major keys by major thirds isn't that exotic, but doing it so quickly that ear just doesn't get a chance to orient itself is.
> they aren't substantially more difficult than other Jazz changes
IMO it's not only the tempo. It's also the fact those changes kind of subvert any feeling of tonality, so you can't really rely on tonal formulas (i.e. cadences) when improvising, so you need to come up with other ways to structure your improv, while constantly shifting between modes/scales/patterns. Becoming fluent in this kind of context is a huge challenge, even in slow tempos.
The changes are actually easy and melodic because they are easily related to other changes that are very close, and you can train yourself to hear into that.
For instance consider that pitch class inversion of a major scale around its root results in precisely a major third key change. E.g. if we invert C major, we get C Phrygian, and C Phrygian is a mode of A♭ major: Coltrane change!
Try improvising around the two chord loop CM7, C♯M7 (or D♭M7), CM7, C#M7 by shifting between C major and its inversion C Phrygian; it is very melodic and intuitive.
You can feel/invoke similar mood changes when following the Coltrane changes.
C#M7/D♭M7 contains a Fm triad, so it evokes hint of the common parallel minor device. C Phrygian and C Aeolian/minor are in fact only one note off, Phrygian is Aeolian with the second degree flattened.
A Coltrane key change can be fibbed by the improviser by a parallel major/minor shift which is so ingrained into the pop music repertoire that it's easy to find familiar idioms that the listener will latch onto. You omit one note that doesn't work and are good to go.
Maybe this works as review for people who already know it, but it seems like it might be overwhelming for beginners. Learning to recognize 2-5-1 when you hear it in a song might be a better way to start?
Despite taking piano lessons as a kid, I was in college before I learned to recognize 12-bar blues whenever I heard it. That's pretty late, but you're part of the lucky 10,000 whatever day you learn.
This stuff is completely irrelevant if you haven't gotten at least proficient at Bebop and blues. Following the career trajectory of musicians around that era is a good way to build up to those types of music. You start with swing in the 20s and 30, bebop in the 30s and 40s, post-bop and modal jazz in the 50s, then the weird Coltrane changes and free jazz and stuff like that later. I tried really hard to learn those Coltrane patterns when I was first starting off with Jazz but if you don't have much improvisational vocabulary, especially over 251s you will be doing 10x as much work
"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."
dat dude sounds half the time like complete nonsense and then like jazz and blues ... he has so very few out of the box moments, ... is what I thought a few days ago .. and just now I remembered he's one of them fellas who made that box before there was one
29 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 38.3 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tIvfP9A2w
Tommy Flanagan put out a recording of Giant Steps with his own trio in the 1980s. Having had enough time by then to woodshed the changes, his improvs are exquisite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PWynH-CEc
The point is that this Vox presentation and many other articles on the Coltrane changes present them as so revolutionary that improvisers struggle, but on its own that's not true.
There are records which predate Giant Steps which are equally harmonically interesting and challenging and which similarly modulate through many key centers, like Con Alma [1] by Dizzy Gillespie from 1954 or Lush Life [2] by Billy Strayhorn from 1948.
What Coltrane did with Giant Steps was akin to calling for Lush Life at 300 beats per minute.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLUyVyM626A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqTDm34vyj0
On more straightforward changes, I can usually internalize the melody and harmonic motion well enough to form a sensible solo, but I've got my limits. Fortunately the era of "Giant Steps" getting called on every gig has more or less passed.
But I acknowledge that in that context, it's an "out there" harmonic adventure which builds tension, to be released when the final section harps on the tonic.
I still think that it's mostly the tempo that makes Giant Steps feel alien. Modulating through major keys by major thirds isn't that exotic, but doing it so quickly that ear just doesn't get a chance to orient itself is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHGFo7fRIqc
IMO it's not only the tempo. It's also the fact those changes kind of subvert any feeling of tonality, so you can't really rely on tonal formulas (i.e. cadences) when improvising, so you need to come up with other ways to structure your improv, while constantly shifting between modes/scales/patterns. Becoming fluent in this kind of context is a huge challenge, even in slow tempos.
For instance consider that pitch class inversion of a major scale around its root results in precisely a major third key change. E.g. if we invert C major, we get C Phrygian, and C Phrygian is a mode of A♭ major: Coltrane change!
Try improvising around the two chord loop CM7, C♯M7 (or D♭M7), CM7, C#M7 by shifting between C major and its inversion C Phrygian; it is very melodic and intuitive.
You can feel/invoke similar mood changes when following the Coltrane changes.
C#M7/D♭M7 contains a Fm triad, so it evokes hint of the common parallel minor device. C Phrygian and C Aeolian/minor are in fact only one note off, Phrygian is Aeolian with the second degree flattened.
A Coltrane key change can be fibbed by the improviser by a parallel major/minor shift which is so ingrained into the pop music repertoire that it's easy to find familiar idioms that the listener will latch onto. You omit one note that doesn't work and are good to go.
Despite taking piano lessons as a kid, I was in college before I learned to recognize 12-bar blues whenever I heard it. That's pretty late, but you're part of the lucky 10,000 whatever day you learn.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
-- Quincy Jones
https://archive.is/yfQpJ
> At its core, the drawing is the circle of fifths, familiar to most musicians. Coltrane's version fills in the circle with chromatic scales...