Giant Steps

Art TaylorArt Taylorアート・テイラー was the house drummer on countless Blue Note sessions in the 1950s–60s. He anchored Coltrane's studio recording of Giant StepsGiant StepsJohn Coltrane · 1960 (1960). He later moved to Europe, spending decades in Paris where he documented jazz musicians in interviews that became the book Notes and Tones.

John ColtraneJohn Coltraneジョン・コルトレーン dedicated the blues 'Mr. P.C.' on his 1959 album Giant StepsGiant StepsJohn Coltrane · 1960 to Paul ChambersPaul Chambersポール・チェンバース. The tune was both a tribute to a peerless bassist and a thank-you to a comrade from the Miles Davis quintet years.

In May 1959, Tommy FlanaganTommy Flanaganトミー・フラナガン played on John ColtraneJohn Coltraneジョン・コルトレーン's Giant StepsGiant StepsJohn Coltrane · 1960 session. His solo struggled to keep up with the unprecedented chord changes of the title track — a legendary moment Flanagan would later acknowledge as "an accident."

Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb played as one of the great piano trios. But the bond ran deeper than the bandstand: when Chambers died in 1969, Cobb recalled, Kelly sank into heavy drinking — he had loved Paul — and Kelly himself was gone by 1971.

On the title track of Coltrane's 1959 Giant Steps, pianist Tommy Flanagan reportedly hadn't fully absorbed the tune's dense chord changes before the take, and his solo trails off into near silence. The album's signature piece is remembered as much for its accompanist's hesitation as for its harmonic breakthrough.

Jimmy Cobb was the newcomer who had just replaced the previous drummer in Miles Davis's sextet. The Kind of Blue (1959) sessions were cut almost live off the sketches, with barely any rehearsal, and the result became the best-selling jazz album of all time.

Kind of Blue is remembered for its pianist's modal chords, but the one blues track was actually played by someone else, Wynton Kelly. That same year, Kelly also turns up on Coltrane's harmonically brutal Giant Steps — not on the punishing title track, but on the album's one quiet ballad, 'Naima.'

In 1959, John Coltrane's first attempt at recording Giant Steps didn't produce a finished album, so he re-recorded most of it weeks later with a different lineup. The drummer everyone now associates with the record, Art Taylor, wasn't part of that first session.