There is something about John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” that just instills fear and respect among Jazz (and non-Jazz) musicians. Not only is the composition intimidating, but ‘Trane doesn’t make it easy for us when he navigates through the tune so effortlessly and beautifully. This tune scares the bejeezus out of just about every musician I know and if you non-musicians don’t believe me go find one of your music pals and say the words “Giant Steps” and watch for the growing panic in their eyes. One of my Governor’s School students called it the “hardest song in the real book” which, I think, is an arguable point. People think the song is hard because the harmony seems so foreign compared to what we are used to hearing. Because of this, Giant Steps has earned a reputation for being impossible for us mere mortals to play. This causes a lot of players to psyche themselves out, never bothering to really learning about the chord changes, where they come from, and why they sound the way that they do.
Which brings me to the title of this post: When you boil it down, Giant Steps has three chords. I know it might seem nuts, but go get your Real Book, open it up and take a look. You basically have three major 7th chords (Eb, G, and B) set a major third apart and some Dominant-functioning Dominant 7th chords stuck in between. He starts with Bmaj7, goes to the V7 of G (which is D7) then goes to Gmaj7, goes the V7 of Eb (Bb7), then goes to Ebmaj7 ends the four bar phrase with a “two-five” (A-7 D7) to Gmaj7 and then starts the pattern again using those same three chords in a different order, then he reintroduces the three chords in the final eight bars using some more two fives. It’s not that complicated! If you look this over a few times you are gonna find that even though these changes sound a little unnatural to the uninitiated– they aren’t that hard to understand, or even to play. (An excellent article about the “Trane Cycles” can be found here)
What makes Giant Steps difficult is the ridiculous tempo at which it is usually played coupled with the fact that if you don’t really know this type of harmony inside and out you don’t stand a chance at finding your way back in if you get lost. The tempo is a real obstacle for a lot of people. If you listen to the original recording and then the outtake featured on new releases of the album, you will notice that Tommy Flannagan appears to be struggling a little compared to Cedar Walton’s performance on an earlier attempt. Flannagan’s anxiety is not unfamiliar territory for many of us. Secondly, the harmony really is unique, and even though I think it is easy to understand, it doesn’t make it easy to HEAR. This is my problem– I I understand Giant Steps, but I cannot play it in any way that would convince anybody that I knew what I was doing. Of course, this is not surprising since I spend more time listening to Wilson Pickett and Motown than Bartok and Shostakovich. I enjoy “out” music, but I don’t hear it, it’s not part of my vocabulary so any attempt I make with it, I will just sound like psuedo-intellectual trying to impress you with a new word I read off of my desktop calendar.
You have to realize that Trane heard these changes. He didn’t think that the idea of using cycles was just clever and nifty and then went to write a song incorporating them. He heard it first.
I made the mistake of signing up for one of Oscar Stagnaro’s latin jazz bass lab’s while I attended Berklee. I was clueless, I had no idea what I was doing. Why? I had no experience with the music and I’d barely ever listened to it. Since taking that course and making a few CD purchases, I am still no Cachaito but I have a little more competence with the style. I learned from that experience, but I would have done so much better in the course if had I been better exposed to Latin music.
So what should you do about “Giant Steps” if you really want to learn it? Well first of all, stop over-intellectualizing it. Listen to the damn song a million times until you can hear the changes in your head. Learn the melody, write a walking bass line for it (maybe transcribe Paul Chambers’ line, too: he walks over a whole tone scale for the first four bars and it sounds great), but, ultimately, just treat it like a normal tune.
Finally, a note on over-intelectualizing: Occasionally in my time studying music academically, the academic approach failed me. Berklee tends to force Jazz into their own academic pigeonhole, which I guess is fine (hey, they invented that whole concept of “classroom Jazz”). But, if you have no experiences with Jazz prior to attending someplace like Berklee (like I did) then you will fall for their academic mechanisms hook line and sinker and take them as gospel (like I did). You have to temper your studies with practicality and “active listening.” You have to physically enter the space that music creates and hear it for yourself. There is nothing wrong with learning from books and paper, or from hours of practice, but sometimes I feel like I learn more when I shut up and listen. I really like Jamey Aebersold’s philosophy about how all of the answers to our questions are on the recordings. Coltrane did all of the work for you. Put the books away.
