vox3 The most feared song in jazz, explained
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This is John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. It’s considered one of the most important
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jazz albums of all time, it cemented John Coltrane as a legend among
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jazz saxophonists and composers, and it’s home to one of the most one of
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the most revered and feared compositions in jazz history.
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The reason why the album's title track is so iconic can be heard in its first few seconds.
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Coltrane wrote these unique chord changes for Giant Steps, and later went on to use
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them over traditional jazz standards.
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These chords
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came to be known as the Coltrane Changes -- and improvising over them is considered a rite
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of passage for jazz musicians.
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But, if you don’t understand a lick of music theory like me, it’s really hard to see
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how this
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is so legendary.
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Lucky for me, I know two people that can explain why…
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Braxton Cook
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Braxton: Okay you caught me off guard there!
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And Adam Neely
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Adam: Should I get into the, like, technical jargony stuff?
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Let’s cut to the logo first.
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So there’s a moment in the Giant Steps recording that really illustrates just how demanding
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this song is.
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It happens when Tommy Flanagan, the pianist on the record, starts his solo.
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Braxton: The story goes that John Coltrane brought in the music, he shows up ready to
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go and then calls he this really fast tempo.
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Adam: If you hear on the recording, Tommy Flanagan just cannot handle
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the chord progressions as they're going by. His
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improvisation is very halted.
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Braxton: And Tommy Flannagan's just holding on for dear life.
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It really becomes apparent how much he struggled, when you hear Coltrane take off at lightning
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speed the second Flanagan stops.
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Braxton: And then it goes down as like one of the most legendary recordings of all time. That’s
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messed up. I’d want another shot. I’d be like bro, don’t put that recording out.
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To understand why this was so difficult for even a highly trained pianist, we need to know
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three basic concepts and it all starts with this: the circle of fifths - it’s kind of like
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a color wheel for music.
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Braxton: Okay, awesome, you glued this stuff and everything. This is fire.
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All twelve notes of the western musical scale are on it,
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but you might notice they’re a little mixed up
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That’s because they’re organized by a very special number in music...
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a fifth.
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What’s a fifth?
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Braxton: It's like if you're in the C-major scale,
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you go C, D, E, F, G - right? 1,2,3,4,5.
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From C to G is five notes, from G to D is five notes and… well you get the idea.
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If you play through the circle you’ll traverse the entire keyboard starting on the lowest
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C
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and ending up on the highest C.
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It sounds much more harmonious than just playing all the notes in order.
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That’s because...
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Adam: The fifth is a sound that our ears just like.
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Uh... please explain.
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Adam: Whenever we're hearing anything, whenever we're hearing people sing...
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Adam: Whenever we're hearing people play music, we're hearing these other notes, these overtones
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alongside the pitches that they're playing.
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When I play this C, the first two loudest tones that are pushed through the air are both C,
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one is just an octave higher.
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But other tones travel to our ears as well.
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The third loudest is a G, which happens to be a fifth above C.
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In 1973, Leonard Bernstein demonstrated this phenomenon live on a grand piano at Harvard.
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Listen closely after he hits that note.
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Bernstein: What do we hear now? That G, right? A new tone.
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Again, clear as a bell. You want to hear it again?
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Adam: These overtones are kind of like subliminal tones that you're hearing alongside a regular note.
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Adam: And you're hearing these overtones everywhere.
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A lot of western music is based on the power
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of the fifth, especially how it relates so strongly back to its home chord.
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Adam: In the case of the key of C major we have the G chord resolving to C.
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Adam: And if you’re thinking about what the G chord represents, it represents kind
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of tension. You want this to resolve.
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When it finally does resolve,
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Adam: it creates this feeling of finality, it creates a feeling of home.
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That five to one relationship is present in a lot of chord progressions, including the
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most common one found in jazz.
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The 2-5-1
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Braxton:] The 2-5-1 essentially is like the backbone of most jazz music.
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Even in its most basic form it sounds super jazzy.
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So it comes as no surprise the Coltrane Changes are just chock full of them.
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Which might raise the question: Why was Tommy Flanagan caught off guard when he had
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to improvise over them?
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Well, the Coltrane Changes aren’t in one key, they’re in three keys.
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They’re basically a musical MC Escher painting.
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So each one of these rungs on the circle of fifths represents every possible key center.
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The closer a key is to another, the more notes they have in common.
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Like the C major and G major scale - they’re only different by one note, an F#.
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Okay, we need an analogy to describe this.
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Adam: So the way that I like to think about keys
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is kind of like languages that you have to learn as a jazz improviser.
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You have to be able to be fluent in a key.
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Like maybe C is Spanish and G is Portuguese.
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Those are very similar languages.
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Adam: If that's the case, like okay maybe C is Spanish and you have a distantly
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related language like maybe Japanese.
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Let’s say Japanese is B. There’s not much in common with those two languages. And it’s
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the same with keys. If you play those scales over each other...
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It sounds a lot more discordant.
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Adam: For the most part, most pop music is based around one of these key centers.
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For instance, Carly Rae Jepsen's “Cut to the Feeling” is in A major.
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But some songs modulate to another key for dramatic effect.
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Like Beyonce’s “Love on Top.”
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Adam: Part of the reason why it's really exciting is because you're going
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to a place that's really distant
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on the circle of fifths.
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And you’re creating a new sense of home. Which is exactly what “Love on Top” does.
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But, it doesn’t just happen once, it happens every time she repeats the chorus towards the
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end of the song.
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Adam: And when you chart that sort of thing along the circle of fifths, patterns emerge.
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These types of patterns are what fascinated John Coltrane in the late 1950s and '60s as
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he was trying to push jazz harmony to its limits.
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This is his study of the circle of fifths.
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Braxton: I think what makes Giant Steps really
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special is that it really just, it just documented an artist doing something super unique,
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super stylistic, and virtuosic at the same time.
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Here’s the first 16 bars of Giant Steps again, with just the key changes highlighted.
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If you chart those changes on the circle of fifths it comes out as a pretty dramatic pattern.
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That’s because these keys are separated by major thirds, which divide an octave into
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3 equal parts.
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On the circle of fifths these three keys are as far apart as possible from each other.
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Adam: Giant Steps is kind of like you're shifting from Spanish to Arabic to Japanese
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very quickly.
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By quickly, he means like every two beats in a song that’s nearly 300 bpm.
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Adam: It's not only just like you're saying one word per language, you're having to construct
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a sentence out of the language.
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And how does Coltrane make those disparate languages connect? With one of the most ubiquitous
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phrases in jazz, the five one.
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Adam: What he's doing
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is taking some of the conventional ideas of tonal harmony,
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the conventional relationships between the five chord and the one chord and
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applying it to this very chaotic circling,
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sort of chord progression that is the Coltrane Changes.
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Adam: So if we were all in the same key, it would sound like this.
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Adam: But because we're going from key center to key center, it sounds very different.
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This is why the Coltrane Changes are like this picture here.
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Even though you’re seeing things from a completely new perspective you still feel
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like you’ve made it home somehow.
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When Tommy Flanagan saw the charts for Giant Steps he knew he wasn’t going to just have
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to play this chord progression - he was going to have to improvise over it.
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very quickly.
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Braxton: That was probably so funny, he was probably like, "What?!"
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Adam: It is a bit of a rite of passage to say that you not only can improvise on Giant Steps,
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but you can also improvise in all 12 keys.
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Adam: Now, generations of jazz musicians are approaching Giant Steps
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as the sort of pinnacle of improvisation.
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Wait. I think I’ve got an analogy for this. It’s like you’re a cab driver and instead
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of only knowing one way to get somewhere, you have to know every back alley and side
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street just in case.
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Braxton: It's essentially like that. You still get to the same location,
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but it’s really interesting and you might see
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some really cool stuff in the neighborhood.
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Braxton: But ultimately I still think the music boils down to 5 1. People want to come
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back home.
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Thanks so much for watching the first of three videos
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I'm going to release in the next couple of weeks on Jazz.
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I want to give a special thanks to Braxton Cook and Adam Neely.
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Between the time that I interviewed Braxton and now, he's released a full album.
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Please check it out below and of course
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special, special thanks to Adam Neely.
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You can check out his YouTube channel below.
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Until next time!
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