“Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.
Sooner or later, a sax player has to deal with it–that most lopsided, knuckle-busting of all digitally oriented tunes.
It’s a tough nut to crack, but it’s also a very rewarding one. The tune has a beautiful, geometrical logic to it. Practicing patterns to it comes easy, but breaking away from the patterns and doing something truly inventive in an improvisation is a challenge. You’ve really earned your saxophone merit badge when you can get around comfortably in “Giant Steps.”
Around ten years ago, I steeped myself in “Giant Steps” for a lengthy period, to the exclusion of just about everything else. My focused practice paid off: I got to where I could negotiate the changes with a fair degree of fluency and creativity at over 300 on the metronome. Not a bad achievement–but I forgot how to play the blues. I kid you not! You’d think all that technical work would bleed over into the rest of my playing, and I”m sure there were ways it did. But when it came to sounding pretty on a basic bebop blues, my fingers just didn’t seem to remember the territory. It was weird.
I can still get around “Giant Steps” today if I need to, but I’m pretty rusty at it. However, my blues playing sounds much more convincing. It”s a trade-off. If I had all the hours of the day to practice, I’d practice all hours of the day. But in this busy life, I do what I can. We can’t all be Coltrane. For that matter, none of us can. I’m content to listen to him, admire him, learn from him…and enjoy playing my horn.
[…] was a time in my musical life, maybe ten years ago, when I became moderately obsessed with “Giant Steps.” I painstakingly wrote down my practice material in a music notebook, which I continued to add to […]