Giant Steps: The Coltrane Tune That Tripped Up Tommy Flanagan

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In May 1959 John Coltrane recorded a new tune of his called “Giant Steps.”

The chords move through three keys, B, G and E-flat, and they don’t sit still in any of them. A couple of beats here, a couple of beats there, at around 290 beats a minute, a tempo that doesn’t leave you time to think.

Each key is a major third down from the last, so the three of them split the octave into equal parts. The first bar goes B major to D7. The second goes G major to B-flat 7. The third lands on E-flat major. The whole tune is only 16 bars, and it packs in 26 chord changes.

Tommy Flanagan’s solo on Giant Steps

The piano player on the date was Tommy Flanagan, one of the best there was. He’d go on to spend years as Ella Fitzgerald’s pianist. Paul Chambers was on bass and Art Taylor was on drums.

Flanagan had barely had time with the tune, and you can hear it. His solo on the record is careful and sparse, start and stop, like somebody picking his way across ice. The tune took a lot of false starts and rejected takes, and the take that came out is one of the rare times on record you hear Flanagan sound unsure of himself.

In 1982 Flanagan made his own album of Coltrane tunes, with George Mraz on bass, and called it Giant Steps. It got a Grammy nomination. I like to think he was settling a score.

The first chord of “Giant Steps” is B major.

Anyway.

A B blues over an F blues

Here’s an idea that sounds like a mistake: play a B blues over an F blues.

B is about as far away from F as a note can get. It’s a tritone, exactly half an octave. On paper it’s the wrong key entirely.

I’m not going to walk you through it here, because it only makes sense once the basics are under your fingers. But the idea underneath it’s simple enough to say out loud.

What makes a note right or wrong

A note isn’t right or wrong on its own. It’s right or wrong depending on where it goes next.

Players who know that can play something that sounds crazy on paper and make it land. Players who don’t are stuck picking safe notes out of a scale and hoping.

So the basics come first: the few notes that actually matter on each chord. If you’re new to soloing, I lay out the first step in how to solo on upright bass. And if you’d rather walk “Giant Steps” than solo on it, here’s how Peter Washington walks the Giant Steps bass line.

Get those few notes under your fingers on every chord. That’s what lets you go after the stuff that sounds wrong until you hear it.