Stories of Standards: Giant Steps

Tune in to Jazz with Victor Cooper – weekdays from 6-9 a.m. MT – for Stories of Standards to hear our favorite versions of this song all week long starting Monday, July 23!

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“Giant Steps”, recorded in April 1959, became the title cut of John Coltrane’s first album as a leader on Atlantic Records. Coltrane had been dismissed from Miles Davis’ band in 1957 for drug and alcohol abuse which led to a seminal 1958 return to Philadelphia where he quit heroin cold-turkey, experienced a spiritual awakening and composed “Giant Steps”. Featuring the third-related chord movements that came to be known as Coltrane changes, “Giant Steps” contains a rapid progression of chord changes through three keys shifted by major thirds, creating an augmented triad. “Down Beat” jazz critic Ira Gitler coined the term “sheets of sound” to describe the effects created; Nat Hentoff in the liner notes for Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” album describes the sound as “multi-note hailstorms of dense textures that sound like a simultaneous series of waterfalls”.

In 1943 John Coltrane (1926-1967) moved from small-town North Carolina to Philadelphia, where Johnny Hodges (alto saxophone) and Dexter Gordon (tenor saxophone) were two of his earliest heroes. Coltrane’s time in the Navy during World War II gave him a chance to use the GI Bill to study music. In turn, his time with Miles Davis (1955 – 1959) took him from small local bands to national celebrity, while his summer with Thelonious Monk (mid-1957) contributed greatly to his understanding and incorporation of modal jazz into the bebop of the time. John Coltrane never ceased in his musical and spiritual explorations. In 1966 he told Nat Hentoff “There is never any end…there are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at.”