Giant Steps

cool yeah i'll definitely have to to give it a listen um yeah i have a a few different ones that i think are like a couple personal favorites of mine i think that uh probably my second favorite coltrane album is a crescent still from like the impulse time um it kind of feels like a love supreme but a little bit more kind of like in a straight line if that makes sense like a little bit more straightforward um straight ahead than love supreme but they're still kind of like really getting after it so i really really like crescent some people say it's like his best album um i can see why people would say that uh and then another personal favorite for me is like it's the perfect sunday morning listening album is ballads and it's just like his ballad playing is so incredible so to get an album just full of it it is like man it's uh it's beautiful but i mean there's so many other albums and if we didn't mention your favorite album you know it's because that he has a catalog of like over 100 great albums so don't don't blame us

right there's all the stuff with miles yeah there's all the you know there's like you can go on and on there's the prestige stuff yeah um and then there's uh giant steps and my favorite things

my favorite thing is way up there for me as well and giant steps you know

Yeah, so you could take it anywhere.

But yeah, I just think like, for me, it doesn't get much better than those three that I mentioned.

there was a video by, you know, Supreme, who are now a huge company.

But they had a video with John Coltrane, Giant Steps on, which was really cool.

It was an amazing video as well.

But then there was also a lot of hip-hop that was on those kind of videos at the time.

Now back to Quincy Jones.

Quincy Jones claimed that John Coltrane's masterpiece, Giant Steps, was stolen from Nicolas Slonimsky's book on 12-tone theory.

It probably was, but you wouldn't recognize it.

What you might recognize immediately is Michael Jackson's "mamase, mamasa, mamafusa" melody from his 1982 hit Wanna Be Startin' Somethin.' Now, that's a direct rip from the Cameroonian songwriter and trumpeter Manu Dibango's nineteen seventy-two composition Soul Makossa.

tune, If You Only Knew.

First up in the set, we heard from tenor saxophonist Don Braden from his debut recording, The Time Is Now, and it featured Tom Harrell at the trumpet, Benny Green again at the piano with Christian McBride bass and Carl Allen at the drums, and they did the great American songbook classic, Will You Still Be Mine? Now tenor saxophonist Frank Foster with Dad Jones and Mel Lewis on Giant Steps.

Thank you.

so

Thank you.

Thank you.

Tenor saxophonist Frank Foster, who was also the arranger on that one, from the pen of John Coltrane, that was Giant Steps.

And joining Frank to create that tenor saxophone battle was Greg Herbert, who's from the Thad Jones Mel Lewis Orchestra.

That is a tremendous album.

Now, I also think that you should be looking at Giant Steps.

That's really my favorite John Coltrane album.

Giant Steps.

Giant Steps.

Great album.

I love that album.

and it's just titled Johnny Coltrane and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman so that one I listened to and also the album Ballads where John Coltrane does these ballads just so beautiful with his his quartet the John Coltrane quartet with McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones And so, yeah, I really would love for you to listen to those.

But the late music is another matter,

isn't it? Well, it's a little thorny for a listener and musician alike and has been, you know, because of the success of My Favorite Things and for musicians, Impressions and Giant Steps, which are milestones in jazz, of course, it's been relegated to a kind of not insignificant, but not really noticed.

And I think that the late period, I mean, you can't compare it, but the late period was just an amazing time for Coltrane and what he was doing and how he played, first of all, the saxophone just the technical aspect, he raised his game once again.

And the other thing was the communal aspect of the music and the, you know, several saxophones at the same time and two or three drummers.

This may annoy both jazz and Indian classical connoisseurs.

I can almost see someone writing, what about giant steps in 1959 in shouty caps in the comments.

There are no chord changes or progressions in an Indian classical raag improvisation, might be another.

And what is Coltrane without the Coltrane changes? This is not setting out to compare two kinds of music or to make a conclusive case.

Jazz CDs were still hard to come by in India and expensive when they turned up.

So my friends and I would buy one cassette or CD among us, make copies and write the track names by hand on the jacket.

That was how I got my first copies of Kind of Blue and Giant Steps.

Then a friend made me one of these copies of Afro Blue Impressions, recordings from 1963 concerts in Stockholm and Berlin with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones.

If Dr.

West could only save one Coltrane album, house is on fire, you gotta run out, you can't save but one Coltrane album, is it Love Supreme, Giant Steps, Blue Train, or something else? You're listening to Tavis Smiley.

Just a little taste of my one and only love for my John Coltrane as we celebrate, uh, his centennial birthday.

Uh, what a great first hour this has been.

Let me ask two questions, Doc.

You weave it together as you will, not my typical way, but Coltrane is dead at 40, uh, sadly.

What did we miss, uh, perhaps over the next 20 or 30 years? What did we miss by his being gone so soon? And if you c- and if you could only save one album, only one, uh, Love Supreme, Giant Steps, Blue Train, or something else?

Oh, Lord.