Giant Steps | Overplayed or Underused?

A brief take on the tune, the history, and how I've used it in my practice routine over the years.

From its arrival in the jazz world in early 1960 on John Coltrane’s 5th studio album as a band leader, this song has collected both accolades and baggage. From the somewhat controversial piano solo on the master take that saw Tommy Flanagan take a shit-load of lot of flack for over the years, and the groan that perhaps you feel at a jam session when someone calls it and you just ask yourself “why…?”, to the many great moments in jazz history that have seen people interpret the song and bring new life and meaning to it through the decades.

Let’s start with Tommy. I’m in the camp that thinks it was kind of unfair to throw this tune Trane had been working on as an exercise in his practice routine for months, up on the stand (in the studio, on the session, and with no rehearsal as I understand it) and just expect the cats around him to explode on it just like him.

Trane plays some of his greatest shit ever for two minutes on the song, and then Tommy gets thrown under the bus. He kind of hacks through a couple of choruses trying to play some linear ideas. There are some really unnatural sounding gaps in the playing, and then he eventually resigns himself to the fact that it’s not going to happen, and just comps for the rest of the solo. If you don’t know the track, make sure you check it below. It’s ground zero for what I want to highlight about the tune.

Now from 1960 onwards, this becomes one of the most covered original jazz tunes of all time. There are versions by Pat Metheny, Joe Pass, Michael Brecker, kenny Garrett, Mulgrew Miller, Jaco Pastorius, and the list goes on and on. Tommy Flanagan even recorded the song again years later, and called the album Giant Steps!

If you’ve ever been to music school, to a jam session, or played gigs in any jazz scene, I’m sure someone has called the tune on more than one occasion. In Berklee it was a bit of a pissing contest at times, and at jam sessions, forget about. People just want to flex. But in amongst the feeling of this being a song to steer well clear of throughout my career (despite spending years working on it) I still see a lot of value in it as an exercise: the exact thing Trane used it for before it became this legendary moment in his career.

It has since become this perceived benchmark of whether you can play jazz or not. And as bullshit as I think most of that that is, there might be some truth to it if you don’t think about the song in its stereotypical setting of the jam session or college practice room. It is Coltrane’s way of altering the ii-V-I, plus a bunch of ii-V-I’s in sequence based on the augmented triad for the root motion. Eb, G, and B. It’s a goldmine of information and practice material, even if all you ever do with it is outline the chord tones.

As many different versions of this song as I’ve listened to, transcribed, and committed to memory, I still find value in the process of continuing that work with Giant Steps. This isn’t a style of music I play anymore and would never think to play that song on my own gig, but when used with the right intent, it can provide you with the tools for absolute harmonic mastery of your instrument.

I want to share the most recent version I’ve been listening to with you. It’s from 1996 in New York with Kenny Garrett, Pat Metheny, Nat Reeves, and Brian Blade. A bootleg made on who-knows-what kind of recorder, and with that lo-fi equipment comes the sound of my early days in NYC. I went to these shows as much as I possibly could, saw all my heroes that were still alive, recorded them when possible, and learnt more from these bootlegs than any college education could ever give you.

I recently transcribed Pat’s solo on this track because I’m going to share it with my students in its entirety in the Transcription Vault at Janek’s Bass Studio. And again, I can’t reiterate enough that this is not a style I play and have no intention of calling Giant Steps with my trio anytime soon. But the process of transcription and imitation really helps keep my phrasing, my time, my sound, and my ear incredibly tuned to music. No matter what the style, doing the work is always going to be of huge benefit to us, especially if we’re inspired by the music we’re transcribing.

Now if I hadn’t just deleted every single post I have ever made on Instagram (a story for another post), I could have shared a link to me playing the first chorus of this transcription. But instead, how about the actual transcription of the first chorus of Pat’s solo?

To be able to share the crux of my process with rare bootlegs I’ve collected over the past 25 years, and how I mine them for information, is pretty exciting. What you’re hearing in this entire Pat Metheny solo is probably four hours of work in terms of the transcription (yes, I do write everything down in a manuscript book as my memory just isn’t good enough to retail for decades). And then how long I get to work on that material and learn the whole solo, is now dictated by family life and my touring/recording schedule.

In my 20’s I would spend weeks with two or three big solos like this on the go simultaneously. Practicing each one for 2 or 3 hours a day, and also working on fundamentals for at least 3 hours on top of that. A typical practice day was at least 8 hours of playing when I first moved to NYC. Maybe if I’d had more gigs earlier on I’d have had way less time to practice and be way more shit now. 🤷‍♂️ I’m grateful for the time I had back then. Mostly unemployed but never happier.

I’ll leave you with another bootleg clip, and it’s one of the very rare instances of me playing the tune. Maybe the first time in 15 years. In fact, it’s me and Hadrien Feraud in Los Angeles a few months back doing a two-bass gig with Gene Coye on drums. Hadrien called Giant Steps, and my first reaction was to do something REALLY different with it. So that’s what this clip is. My solo and the head out with Hadrien comping. Hadrien had soloed over the changes, so we made my solo into a vamp and I used the harmonizer both for the solo (where I referenced the melody and changes from time to time) and the head out.

So I think it is both overplayed and underused. Overplayed in the sense that not all, but most people play it with no originality and simply use it to flex. They play it live like the exercise it started life as. Underused because I think you don’t have to play it live to gain an immense amount of knowledge from it by using it in your practice routine, and way more of us could use it like that on a multitude of levels. You don’t have to be an advanced player to get something out of it. It doesn’t need to only be played at 380bpm. Listen to what Pat Metheny did with it on Trio 99 → 00.

Or Poncho Sanchez on Trane’s Delight.

Do you have a Giant Steps moment? A Giant Steps trauma? A favorite version? Or a question about how it works, or what might be a good place to start approaching it? Let me know in the comments.

Janek