Supreme lovely. John Coltrane channels the divine through his sax. Photograph: Redferns Miles Davis was a good authority on the saxophonist John Coltrane, who played in one of the trumpeter's bands in the 1950s. Their time spent working together began with Davis's rise to stardom and ended not long after the magnificent Kind of Blue, on which Coltrane played a masterful role. In his autobiography written with Quincy Troupe, Davis summed up Coltrane: Trane was the loudest, fastest saxophonist I've ever heard. He could play real fast and real loud at the same time and that's very difficult to do. it was like he was possessed when he put that horn in his mouth. He was so passionate- fierce – and yet so quiet and gentle when he wasn't playing. Coltrane, who died of liver failure at 40, has probably been the most influential saxophonist in any musical genre, including Lester Young, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and even Charlie Parker. His dazzling solos are now transcribed as exercises for students, while players all over the world still try to mimic his characteristically intense and soulful sound more than 40 years after his death. Giant Steps, an astonishing tenor-saxophone improvisation Coltrane recorded in 1959, has been a model for aspiring sax players ever since, but it's far more than a technical exercise, pointing the way toward the lava-flows of scales and runs that the critic Ira Gitler famously described as sheets of sound. Like an engineer obsessively building a machine that could blast free of the restraints of time, space and mortality, Coltrane assembled a distinctive technique from miniscule parts and infinitesimal details. But his mission was to fuse them all into one single, huge, imploring sound in which all the details, while crucial, were no longer individually audible. For him, Giant Steps was more like a first step. This was music to dazzle.
History will undoubtedly enshrine this disc as a watershed the likes of which may never truly be appreciated. Giant Steps bore the double-edged sword of furthering the cause of the music as well as delivering it to an increasingly mainstream audience. Although this was John Coltrane's debut for Atlantic, he was concurrently performing and recording with Miles Davis. Within the space of less than three weeks, Coltrane would complete his work with Davis and company on another genre-defining disc, Kind of Blue, before commencing his efforts on this one. Coltrane (tenor sax) is flanked by essentially two different trios. Recording commenced in early May of 1959 with a pair of sessions that featured Tommy Flanagan (piano) and Art Taylor (drums as well as Paul Chambers - who was the only band member other than Coltrane to have performed on every date. When recording resumed in December of that year, Wynton Kelly (piano) and Jimmy Cobb (drums) were instated - replicating the lineup featured on Kind of Blue, sans Miles Davis of course. At the heart of these recordings, however, is the laser-beam focus of Coltrane's tenor solos. All seven pieces issued on the original Giant Steps are likewise Coltrane compositions. He was, in essence, beginning to rewrite the jazz canon with material that would be centered on solos - the 180-degree antithesis of the art form up to that point. These arrangements would create a place for the solo to become infinitely more compelling. This would culminate in a frenetic performance style that noted jazz journalist Ira Gitler accurately dubbed sheets of sound. Coltrane's polytonal torrents extricate the amicable and otherwise cordial solos that had begun decaying the very exigency of the genre - turning it into the equivalent of easy listening. He wastes no time as the disc's title track immediately indicates a progression from which there.
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