John Coltrane's Giant Steps stands as one of those rare records that changed the language of jazz while reaching far beyond its usual audience. It is a landmark album in every sense, capturing a moment when the music was being pushed somewhere bold, modern and completely new. Although this was Coltrane's debut for Atlantic, he was at the same time performing and recording with Miles Davis. In less than three weeks, he would finish his work with Davis on another era-defining album, Kind of Blue, before turning to these sessions. Coltrane on tenor sax is joined here by what is essentially two different trios. Recording began in early May 1959 with Tommy Flanagan on piano, Art Taylor on drums and Paul Chambers on bass. Chambers was the only musician besides Coltrane to appear on every session. When recording resumed in December that year, Wynton Kelly took over on piano and Jimmy Cobb on drums, recreating the lineup heard on Kind of Blue, minus Miles Davis. Across it all, the real centre of gravity is Coltrane's astonishing tenor work and the intense clarity of his solos. All seven tracks on the original Giant Steps were written by Coltrane. With this material, he was beginning to reshape the jazz canon around a new kind of improvisation, placing the solo at the heart of the music in a way that felt like a complete reversal of what had come before. These arrangements opened up new space, making solos more searching, more complex and more vital. That approach would come to be described by journalist Ira Gitler as "sheets of sound". Coltrane's dense, polytonal runs pushed past the more relaxed and familiar solo style that had started to soften the urgency of jazz, and brought the music back into sharper, more demanding territory. It starts right away with the title track, Giant Steps, a piece that makes its intentions clear from the first bars. The harmonic movement is restless and fearless, and Coltrane's improvisation weaves through melody and solo so tightly that the two seem almost inseparable.
