Coming to Terms With Giant Steps: Music and Embracing Limitation
In a career of all-time great performances, universally beloved arrangements, and some of the most forward thinking approaches to music in the 20th century, there is one piece which towers above all others in the legacy of the great John Coltrane. Released in 1960, Giant Steps, is a musical monolith. Performed by one of finest quartets ever assembled: John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Paul Chambers (bass), Tommy Flanagan (piano), and Art Taylor (drums), Giant Steps is the embodiment of the very concept of chops. Giant Steps, by sheer weight of its visceral power has developed a reputation among musicians, and due the institutionalisation of Jazz within music academia, it has become the great proving ground for any instrumentalist worth their salt. In the 63 years since it was first released it has come to be thought of less and less as a piece to be enjoyed but as a beast to be overcome. What it actually communicates is secondary to you proving that you are capable of improvising as fast and as tonally precise as possible. I'm not going to explain to you here all of the layers of music theory that are underpinning the piece, there are a number of people better equipped than I who have already tackled that quest. All you really need to know is that Giant Steps is fast as hellfire and it expects you to juggle key changes like they're chainsaws. Tommy Flanagan, whilst playing his solo, sounds like he's being eaten alive by the demands of the music. If you've never heard it, give it a listen now, and come back to this later.
The point of this piece is not to break down Giant Steps, to try and explain its inner workings, then elaborate that out into some greater point about the nature of art. What I really want to do here is to explain how Giant Steps helped me to achieve the healthiest resolution any hobby level musician can come to. A sort of musical Dao, if you will. I can't play Giant Steps. I will never be able to play Giant Steps. And that is fine.
Obviously, this isn't just limited to Giant Steps, there's undoubtably hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music that are completely beyond my capability. I can't play YYZ, or Toccata and Fugue either. But, I think Giant Steps best represents the pinnacle of this kind of composition. I don't believe I know of a piece of music that was originally intended to be so emotional and liberating and has since been reduced to an academic exercise to be endlessly practiced to death. A victim of its own ingenuity.
I've played the drums for 10 years now, before that I played a little bit of the cello, and since then I've picked up the guitar and the banjo. I've had lessons and I've been self taught, I've studied music theory formally and informally, and I understand most aspects of music production from composition to mixing. Music is one of the great true loves of my life and will continue to be so for as far as I can see. I am also someone with a physical disability, one which especially effects co-ordination, fine motor skills, and the dexterity available (particularly down the left side). From my own observation it seems as if the process of learning an instrument for most people occurs along a similar course:
1) An initial burst of enthusiasm about the instrument, usually brought about by some encounter with an artist playing the instrument in a way that excites.
2) An obsession with the highest technical accomplishments played on that instrument, usually manifested as an interest in Classical Music, harder forms of Jazz, and Progressive or Technical Rock/Metal.
3) A feeling of complete and overwhelming ineptitude in the face of such technical accomplishment.
It is here that one of two things happens, either the player quits or they come to terms with the time required to achieve virtuosity and decide if that is want to pursue. This is the wall I hit for the longest time once my last ensemble disbanded in 2018 and university swallowed all of my available practice time. Due to the physical limitations imposed on me by my body, I've never been the most technically accomplished player. The weakness of the left side of my body makes playing even strokes difficult, I can't play a subdivision faster than a semi-quaver, I top out at around 135BPM, the poor range in my ankle movement can make complex kick patterns a nightmare, and I can only comfortably use three of the fingers on my fretting hand. This used to bother me considerably. It especially used to bother me in Rock and Pop settings where the ability to play loud and fast and with the most exciting fills seems to be prized above all else. In the years since I first picked up a pair of drumsticks the whole landscape of social media has also changed, and with it, how music is consumed. If I dare to go onto Instagram or Facebook or YouTube (don't tell me about Tik Tok) I will immediately be inundated with hundreds of short videos of musicians showing off some of the slickest playing imaginable. Every instrument in every single style, sometimes with charts of what they're playing. Overwhelming reminders that you will never live up to the technical standards set by 7 year olds in Sri Lanka. And one wonders just how much this exacerbates this skill barrier issue in some musicians even further, because now it feels as though everyone plays your instrument and they all play it better than you.
Real wisdom, however, is the discovery of a 3rd way. That there is a whole spectrum of music beyond academic mark schemes and Instagram Reel chop masters. It's difficult for those of us to whom that upper technical echelon is off limits to accept this. I think that, once the more typical pathways of development in a skill are blocked for one reason or another, it becomes an incredible challenge to forge a path and a voice which is fulfilling. And this is where a lot of people who enjoy playing tend to drop out. I, personally, have never found a comfortable course. But I keep searching, and this is a process which is, and will remain, on going for the rest of my life. I have had the pleasure to play with so many wonderful musicians and work with some truly great teachers in my life but, at this moment in time, music is a solo endeavour, and conclusions as to how I proceed going forward are going to have to be my own. But the more I reflect on things, and the more my tastes mature, the more it feels to me that it was never virtuosity which attracted me to playing. What made me want to start playing music was an attachment created when I first heard 'My Generation' that this was a human being trying to connect with me through the creation of sound. Which, in its own way, is probably connected to some deeper primal part of my leftover caveman brain that longs to return to the drum circles of in the cradle of civilisation. This is ultimately what the purpose of any musical endeavour is and there's a spectrum of ways of accomplishing this without needing to be Bach, or Charlie Parker, or Yngwie Malmsteen, or Dave Weckl. The Blues is accepted as the birthplace of 20th century popular music, but the Blues is ultimately a primitive style. It's I-III-V, a flattened 7th, and 12 bars. The beat is a 2:3 polyrhythm. Its great mastery is the universe of human emotion pulled out of the simplest structure. Robert Johnson couldn't sight read Stravinsky, so why should I?
The older I get the more realise that these technical excesses don't matter to me. I'm not even really sure if they ever did or if I just convinced myself this was the case. Thinking more and more about the concerns I had as a teenage music student, the more I feel like I just got in my own way. Pursuing something that ultimately wasn't as worthwhile or as meaningful as what I should have been focused on. Prog Metal is over-produced and over-practiced to the point of lifelessness. Jazz has allowed players and academics like Wynton Marsalis to trap it in ember and present it as a museum piece stuck in the Bebop era. Classical music is for kids that weren't allowed to get ice-cream until they memorised the Goldberg Variations (Or maybe that's just what I tell myself, I'm sure someone will tell me otherwise). Wonderful though all these genres are, their highest moments are achieved by players embarking on deeply personal musical expressions channelled through their technique. If the limit to my abilities is that I can play a rock solid shuffle beat, some blues chords, and a few idiosyncratic fills then so be it. If it's good enough for Ringo, it's good enough for me.
Giant Steps is not brilliant because it is so complicated. It doesn't inspire awe simply because we can draw shapes along the circle of fifths while listening to it. The reason Giant Steps is so beautiful - so breathtaking - is because it gives an insight into the mind and soul of one of the 20th century's greatest artists. What Coltrane achieves on Giant Steps is so impressive and so miraculous to anyone listening that it transcends beyond any of its theoretical complexities. What each of the hundreds of Coltrane imitators on YouTube fail to realise is that the best way to honour his memory is not imitation. It's using the ideas he gave us throughout his short life to further propel your own vision for how music can be. While many view Giant Steps as a proving ground, an exercise to be overcome. I choose to view Giant Steps as an outlet to say 'no'. I will never be able to play the Giant Steps changes and that's okay, neither could Tommy Flanagan based on how he played that solo.
Ryan Sweeney (@TheCautiousCrip /Insta: TeaWithZizek)