All language subtitles for The most feared song in jazz, explained

This is John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.
It’s considered one of the most important

jazz albums of all time,
it cemented John Coltrane as a legend among

jazz saxophonists and composers,
and it’s home to one of the most one of

the most revered and feared compositions in
jazz history.

The reason why the album's title track is
so iconic can be heard in its first few seconds.

Coltrane wrote these unique chord changes
for Giant Steps, and later went on to use

them over traditional jazz standards.

These chords

came to be known as the Coltrane Changes -- and
improvising over them is considered a rite

of passage for jazz musicians.

But, if you don’t understand a lick of music
theory like me, it’s really hard to see

how this

is so legendary.

Lucky for me, I know two people that can explain
why…

Braxton Cook

Braxton: Okay you caught me off guard
there!

And Adam Neely

Adam: Should I get into the, like, technical jargony
stuff?

Let’s cut to the logo first.

So there’s a moment in the Giant Steps recording
that really illustrates just how demanding

this song is.

It happens when Tommy Flanagan, the pianist
on the record, starts his solo.

Braxton: The story goes that John Coltrane
brought in the music, he shows up ready to

go and then calls he this really fast tempo.

Adam: If you hear on the recording, Tommy Flanagan just cannot handle

the chord progressions as they're going by. His

improvisation is very halted.

Braxton: And Tommy Flannagan's just holding on for dear life.

It really becomes apparent how much he struggled,
when you hear Coltrane take off at lightning

speed the second Flanagan stops.

Braxton: And then it goes down as like one of the most
legendary recordings of all time. That’s

messed up. I’d want another shot. I’d
be like bro, don’t put that recording out.

To understand why this was so difficult for
even a highly trained pianist, we need to know

three basic concepts and it all starts with this:
the circle of fifths - it’s kind of like

a color wheel for music.

Braxton: Okay, awesome, you glued this stuff
and everything. This is fire.

All twelve notes of the western musical scale
are on it,

but you might notice they’re a little mixed
up

That’s because they’re organized by a
very special number in music...

a fifth.

What’s a fifth?

Braxton: It's like if you're in the C-major scale,

you go C, D, E, F, G - right? 1,2,3,4,5.

From C to G is five notes, from G to D is
five notes and… well you get the idea.

If you play through the circle you’ll traverse
the entire keyboard starting on the lowest

C

and ending up on the highest C.

It sounds much more harmonious than just playing
all the notes in order.

That’s because...

Adam: The fifth is a sound that our ears just
like.

Uh... please explain.

Adam: Whenever we're hearing anything, whenever we're hearing people sing...

Adam: Whenever we're hearing people play music, we're
hearing these other notes, these overtones

alongside the pitches that they're playing.

When I play this C, the first two loudest tones
that are pushed through the air are both C,

one is just an octave higher.

But other tones travel to our ears as well.

The third loudest is a G, which happens to
be a fifth above C.

In 1973, Leonard Bernstein demonstrated this
phenomenon live on a grand piano at Harvard.

Listen closely after he hits that note.

Bernstein: What do we hear now? That G, right? A new tone.

Again, clear as a bell. You want to hear it again?

Adam: These overtones are kind of like subliminal tones that you're hearing alongside a regular note.

Adam: And you're hearing these overtones everywhere.

A lot of western music is based on the power

of the fifth, especially how it relates so
strongly back to its home chord.

Adam: In the case of the key of C major we
have the G chord resolving to C.

Adam: And if you’re thinking about what
the G chord represents, it represents kind

of tension. You want this to resolve.

When it finally does resolve,

Adam: it creates this feeling of finality,
it creates a feeling of home.

That five to one relationship is present in
a lot of chord progressions, including the

most common one found in jazz.

The 2-5-1

Braxton:] The 2-5-1 essentially is like the backbone of most jazz music.

Even in its most basic form it sounds super
jazzy.

So it comes as no surprise the Coltrane Changes
are just chock full of them.

Which might raise the question: Why was
Tommy Flanagan caught off guard when he had

to improvise over them?

Well, the Coltrane Changes aren’t in one
key, they’re in three keys.

They’re basically a musical MC Escher painting.

So each one of these rungs on the circle of fifths
represents every possible key center.

The closer a key is to another, the more notes
they have in common.

Like the C major and G major scale - they’re
only different by one note, an F#.

Okay, we need an analogy to describe this.

Adam: So the way that I like to think about keys

is kind of like languages that you have to learn as a jazz improviser.

You have to be able to be fluent in a key.

Like maybe C is Spanish and G is Portuguese.

Those are very similar languages.

Adam: If that's the case, like
okay maybe C is Spanish and you have a distantly

related language like maybe Japanese.

Let’s say Japanese is B. There’s not much
in common with those two languages. And it’s

the same with keys. If you play those scales over each other...

It sounds a lot more discordant.

Adam: For the most part, most pop music is based around one of these key centers.

For instance, Carly Rae Jepsen's “Cut to the
Feeling” is in A major.

But some songs modulate to another key for
dramatic effect.

Like Beyonce’s “Love on Top.”

Adam: Part of the reason why it's really exciting is because you're going

to a place that's really distant

on the circle of fifths.

And you’re creating a new sense of home.
Which is exactly what “Love on Top” does.

But, it doesn’t just happen once, it happens
every time she repeats the chorus towards the

end of the song.

Adam: And when you chart that sort of thing
along the circle of fifths, patterns emerge.

These types of patterns are what fascinated
John Coltrane in the late 1950s and '60s as

he was trying to push jazz harmony to its
limits.

This is his study of the circle of fifths.

Braxton: I think what makes Giant Steps really

special is that it really just, it just documented
an artist doing something super unique,

super stylistic, and virtuosic at the same
time.

Here’s the first 16 bars of Giant Steps
again, with just the key changes highlighted.

If you chart those changes on the circle of
fifths it comes out as a pretty dramatic pattern.

That’s because these keys are separated
by major thirds, which divide an octave into

3 equal parts.

On the circle of fifths these three keys are
as far apart as possible from each other.

Adam: Giant Steps is kind of like you're
shifting from Spanish to Arabic to Japanese

very quickly.

By quickly, he means like every two beats
in a song that’s nearly 300 bpm.

Adam: It's not only just like you're saying
one word per language, you're having to construct

a sentence out of the language.

And how does Coltrane make those disparate
languages connect? With one of the most ubiquitous

phrases in jazz, the five one.

Adam: What he's doing

is taking some of the conventional ideas of tonal harmony,

the conventional relationships
between the five chord and the one chord and

applying it to this very chaotic circling,

sort of chord progression that is the Coltrane Changes.

Adam: So if we were all in the same key, it would sound like this.

Adam: But because we're going from key center to key center, it sounds very different.

This is why the Coltrane Changes are like
this picture here.

Even though you’re seeing things from a
completely new perspective you still feel

like you’ve made it home somehow.

When Tommy Flanagan saw the charts for Giant
Steps he knew he wasn’t going to just have

to play this chord progression - he was going
to have to improvise over it.

very quickly.

Braxton: That was probably so funny, he was probably like, "What?!"

Adam: It is a bit of a rite of passage to
say that you not only can improvise on Giant Steps,

but you can also improvise in all 12
keys.

Adam: Now, generations of jazz musicians are approaching Giant Steps

as the sort of pinnacle of improvisation.

Wait. I think I’ve got an analogy for this.
It’s like you’re a cab driver and instead

of only knowing one way to get somewhere,
you have to know every back alley and side

street just in case.

Braxton: It's essentially like that. You still get to the same location,

but it’s really interesting and you might see

some really cool stuff in the neighborhood.

Braxton: But ultimately I still think the
music boils down to 5 1. People want to come

back home.

Thanks so much for watching the first of three videos

I'm going to release in the next couple of weeks on Jazz.

I want to give a special thanks to Braxton Cook and Adam Neely.

Between the time that I interviewed Braxton and now, he's released a full album.

Please check it out below and of course

special, special thanks to Adam Neely.

You can check out his YouTube channel below.

Until next time!