Giant Steps

This Vox explainer video about John Coltrane’s most iconic tune is making the rounds right now. It’s well made and engaging. You should watch it!

“Giant Steps” is a beautiful tune, one that rewards as much scrutiny as you care to give it. But it also had some negative effects on jazz as an art form. Read on!

“Giant Steps” is hard to improvise over, both because it has a complex chord progression, and because it’s extremely fast. Here’s the transcription from the New Real Book:

Here is the chord progression in flowchart form. Start on Bmaj7 and go left.

If, like me, you find music theory interesting, then there’s a lot to ponder in “Giant Steps.” The main idea is simple if you understand what a major key is. There are three of them in “Giant Steps”: B major, G major, and E-flat major. All the notes and chords in the tune come from these three keys. Plenty of jazz tunes use multiple keys. But “Giant Steps” is unusual because its three keys are as harmonically distant from each other as possible, and because the tune jumps between them constantly, never settling on any one for more than a bar or two.

Below, you can see a graphic representation of B major. On the left is the chromatic circle, and on the right is the circle of fifths.

Here’s G major, shown the same way:

And here’s E-flat major:

All three of these major scales are “the same” in terms of their intervallic relationships, the pattern of filled and empty slots in the pitch circle. You can rotate the pattern of filled and empty slots to produce any major scale.

Things get interesting when you start juxtaposing the three keys of “Giant Steps” together. The tune is only in one key at a time, but the tempo is so fast that they all blur together perceptually. I assume that Coltrane wants you to be constantly comparing and contrasting them as you listen. Here’s the combination of B and G:

Here’s the combination of G and E-flat:

And here’s the combination of B and E-flat:

Finally, here are all three keys combined together. Notice that while every pitch is in at least one of the keys, there is no pitch common to all three of them.

That last chromatic circle representation is full of intriguing visual symmetry, but it’s jumbled up like a bag of Skittles. The symmetries are easier to see on the circle of fifths, where the overlaps between keys are neatly grouped.

I started drawing circular visualizations of music theory concepts in part due to Coltrane’s influence. He made a famous (to jazz nerds) drawing known as the “tone circle” as a gift for Yusef Lateef–you can see it in Lateef’s Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns.

Lucas Gonze wrote (and drew) a wonderful analysis of this diagram. Roel Hollander also wrote a good explanation of it, along with an examination of Coltrane’s interest in musical geometry generally. If you want a more traditional musicological take, my college jazz professor Andy Jaffe wrote a good one. His book Jazz Harmony has a spine-tingling section on how Coltrane changes relate to the whole tone scale. Finally, if you want broader context, Lewis Porter’s Coltrane biography is a must-read, both for its definitive account of the man’s life, and for its many detailed transcriptions of his music.

So, “Giant Steps” is a fascinating work of art, a prism refracting the combinatorial mysteries of Western twelve-tone equal temperament. Why, then, did I say that it had a negative influence on jazz? The problem is that Coltrane inadvertently helped to usher in a cult of virtuosity at the same moment that jazz was becoming a “respectable” academic music.

At the time of its recording, “Giant Steps” represented the furthest extreme of intellectual and technical ambition in jazz. Now, however, being able to play it is a basic entry requirement for the art form. You won’t be taken seriously as a jazz musician unless you can play “Giant Steps” at speed, and you won’t get the full respect of the other jazz bros unless you can play it in all twelve keys. It’s not enough to “conquer” the tune; the jazz bros have to keep one-upping each other with ever-more-Baroque variations on it.

It would be fine if all this obsessive technical study was leading to better and more creative music, but that is not what’s happening. Instead, the jazz bros treat “Giant Steps” as a kind of musical video game, and compete to beat each others’ high scores. This is boring even for a devoted Coltrane fan like me, and I can only imagine how much it repels casual onlookers.

Jazz bro culture is not Coltrane’s fault. Within a few years of writing “Giant Steps,” he came to realize that it was a dead end, and he went in the opposite direction, playing music with few or no chord changes and open-ended forms. He still implied complex key changes in his own solos, but they happened against a static harmonic background. More importantly, Coltrane never lost sight of the main point of music, which is to communicate emotionally. All of his intellectual abstractions were in the service of melody and feeling. “Giant Steps” itself is a case in point. It’s not just a mathematical puzzle; it’s also one of the loveliest and most memorable melodies in jazz history. After hearing it once, my five-year-old son was walking around humming it. I can explain analytically why the melody works so well, and maybe I’ll do that in a future post. But you don’t need any technical music knowledge to hear how and why it works, because it explains itself with perfect clarity.

Contemporary jazz bros revere Coltrane, but they haven’t abided by his commitment to strong and soulful melodies. It’s rare for a contemporary jazz musician to write a tune you’d want to hear twice. This is due in part to the structure of the music academy. You can systematize the study of harmony, you can write journal articles and books about it, and you can teach it in classes. But you can’t teach the writing of emotionally resonant tunes, because no one knows why we like the tunes we like, and no one has developed a formal approach to writing good ones. These institutional issues aside, though, academic jazz musicians aren’t even trying to figure out how to write catchy tunes. Quite the opposite; they usually look on pop music with disdain. This is not at all in keeping with Coltrane’s own musical values. He knew pop songs were worthy of attention, and they form the basis for many of his best recordings.

The same year he released the Giant Steps LP, Coltrane also released My Favorite Things, which is all reworkings of the most cliched, middle-of-the-road pop standards of its era.

Coltrane’s takes on pop songs are as significant as his originals. It’s impressive to be able to write challenging and abstract art, but it’s even more impressive to be able to use banal pop songs as raw material for art. Few present-day jazz musicians are making the same effort to signify on present-day pop, and their neglect of the commercial mainstream has desperately impoverished their music.

In 1960, it was a politically radical act for a young black man like Coltrane to create demanding art music. In the present day, however, there is nothing radical about continuing to play the way Coltrane did in 1960. The equivalent of present-day jazz bros would be 1960s musicians playing ragtime and Souza marches. Coltrane’s contemporary equivalent isn’t a jazz musician at all, but rather, a rapper or producer. I’d nominate Kendrick Lamar. “Giant Steps” has great historical significance and is worth learning and playing, but the jazz bro approach to it has run its course.

That doesn’t mean that we should stop playing and interpreting “Giant Steps.” We should! But we need to use the tune for forms of musical expression that speak more to the world we live in. Jazz musicians complain that current pop songs are too melodically and harmonically boring compared to the midcentury standards. This is true! The locus of creativity in popular music has shifted away from melody and harmony, and into rhythm and timbre. This is a problem for instrumentalists, because you can’t really engage the sound of a rap or techno track with a saxophone. But you can do it by sampling and remixing. For example, J Dilla uses a sample of “Giant Steps” as performed by Joe Pass for Q-Tip’s song “Let’s Ride.”

Beyond sampling, digital audio manipulation gives us other ways to engage canonical jazz. The best way to learn a jazz tune is to play along with the recording. Thanks to the phase vocoder, you can slow things down to the tempo of your choosing, so playing along with Coltrane on “Giant Steps” is accessible to non-virtuosos like me. I made a remix of the tune at one third of its original tempo.

When you slow something down this extremely in Ableton Live, you need to choose the right warp mode. I like the dramatic stuttering effect you get from Beats mode. I added the Levee break for epic grandiosity, and doubled the melody and bassline with synths. Then I played a “solo” by slicing the melody up and playing back the pieces via MIDI. Could this be a direction for future jazz?

If my trip-hop remix is still too fast, you might prefer to hear “Giant Steps” at 1/30th of its original tempo, via the magic of Paulstretch. Get in touch and I’ll send it to you. The Paulstretched version is positively relaxing to improvise over. I can stop worrying about remembering the changes, because I have ample time to figure out each chord by ear. I can even improvise over it by singing. It’s less like playing a jazz tune, and more like performing an extended meditation on it. If Coltrane were alive, I imagine that he’d be fascinated by the meditative strangeness of Paulstretched audio, and that he’d be deep into Ableton. I’d love to hear what he’d be doing with these tools. Maybe the best tribute we can pay to him is to figure out how he’d approach the music of the present, and then go do it ourselves.