Art Taylor

Giant Steps

John Coltrane · 1960

All Mornin' Long

Red Garland · 1957

Bass on Top

Paul Chambers · 1957

Groovy

Red Garland · 1957

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.

Giant Steps

John Coltrane · 1960

Bass on Top

Paul Chambers · 1957

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.

— Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, Arthur Taylor, 1977

Giant Steps

John Coltrane · 1960

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."

— John Coltrane: His Life and Music, Lewis Porter, 1998

Kind of Blue

Miles Davis · 1959

Giant Steps

John Coltrane · 1960

Kelly Blue

Wynton Kelly · 1959

A.T.'s Delight

Art Taylor · 1960

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.'

Saxophone Colossus

Sonny Rollins · 1956

Roots

Prestige All Stars, The · 1958

2 Trumpets

Art Farmer / Donald Byrd · 1956

Modern Jazz Survey 2 / Baritones & French Horns

Pepper Adams, Cecil Payne, Julius Watkins, David Amram · 1958

In 1956, bassist Doug Watkins showed up for what was just another single-day Prestige date, indistinguishable from the dozens of hard-bop sessions he played that year. That session became Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus, now regarded as one of jazz's most enduring records.

'Round About Midnight

Miles Davis · 1957

Milestones

Miles Davis · 1958

Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet

Miles Davis · 1957

Groovy

Red Garland · 1957

Before he settled on the piano, Red Garland fought as a welterweight boxer in the early 1940s. The famously light block chords on 'Round About Midnight (1957) and Milestones (1958) belong to a man who had once earned money with his fists.