Double Bass Giant Steps (the album): Bad drumming?

[Don Higdon]

Don't dig Coltrane's playing on Giant Steps?

Not to interfere with your lecture, but if you're talking to me, that's not what I said.

OK, but maybe think of it as a snapshot: here's the culmination, captured in 1959, of one genius' wrestlings with playing inside over changes. He's got it down, examined the problem from every angle and attacked it until a solution is found. If you can actually HEAR the changes of Giant Steps (something a professional jazz musician would take for granted, but which might be beyond those in the earlier stages of involvement with the music)

Yeah, I "can actually HEAR the the changes of Giant Steps," all three scales. I'm one of those people who already knew the release of Have You Met Miss Jones, written in the 30's.

then you can listen to Trane's playing on this album as what it really is: the musical equivalent of a really gifted savant solving a Rubic's Cube in record time, or playing multiple games of blindfolded chess, and somehow doing it with the passion inherent in Coltrane's musical expression.

Far be it from me to disparage your enthusiasm.

 

[Don Higdon]

...And Art Taylor was a very fine drummer. I like Giant Steps.

So did I. It helps to know that Art's playing met a standard that everybody wanted to hear at that time. There was a cadre of rhythm players that Prestige and Blue Note used constantly, with everybody. A.T. was one; others were bassists Doug Watkins and George Joyner.

 

[Alexi David]

Yeah, I "can actually HEAR the the changes of Giant Steps," all three scales.

Yup. Giant Steps is easy to solo over. I still don't understand what's the big deal these days.

 

[Jeremy Allen]

Not to interfere with your lecture, but if you're talking to me, that's not what I said.

I certainly was not talking to you at all. It may have looked that way because I quoted you to make the point/joke about jazz versions of Broadway tunes, but I thought the aside about "Syeeda's Song Flute" served to separate the rest of my post from that introductory part. None of the rest of it had anything to do with you. I suppose I can't blame you for the vigor of your riposte, but no, the lecture wasn't for you.

It wasn't specifically for anybody, for that matter; some of you may regard these threads as direct conversations, which they sometimes are, but as someone who uses this board as an archive and who knows that a lot of people poke around after the fact just to learn things and hear opinions, I think it's OK to make interjections every once in awhile. To say something that one thinks needs to be said, for example, or to clarify a point someone else has made, or to make an ass of one's self.

 

[Bruce Lindfield]

You yourself, Bruce, said the album was "hard listening" at first...

I like "hard listening" !!

I woudn't listen to anything else!!

 

[Bruce Lindfield]

And I know Howard fairly well (he likes Coltrane really ) and he qualified his statements, thus :

..comes from a person at the beginnig of their life listening to Coltrane. It's not really 'my opinion on Coltrane' per say, just statement of where I am listening to him. I'll no doubt change my feelings on him over time