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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

The first Coltrane Album I got was with Dolphy doing Rogers & Hammerstein's "Favourite Things" which is approachable, haunting, beautiful, and listed in this article as the breakout hit. Coming to it almost 20 years after (it was a 1961 release, the year of my birth) it blew me away. Songs of my childhood (saw the sound of music every year on holiday for a while there. The 60s didn't have a lot of new films in circulation close to cheap caravan parks apparently.)

Coltrane played with amazing theories of chromatic chord structure[0] which he diagrammed, Like the Bauhaus design theorists did for their colour logic models

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltrane_changes and https://www.openculture.com/2017/04/the-tone-circle-john-col...

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For those of you who think they don't "get" jazz, Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" is a great eye opener. It's a bit long but the tune should be very familiar and recognizable. If you pay attention, and jazz is a type of music that is best enjoyed with attention, you can easily follow what Coltrane is doing to that tune. It gets played, extended, deformed, touched, hinted, lifted and lowered by the creative forces of a great artist. And that's really what jazz is all about.

And then there is this solo by McCoy Tyner, possibly one of the best ever: https://youtu.be/ehYM_cg2DHI

If you like this then definitely check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZIXDTH-sLA Fly with the Wind. It's amazing.

One of my favorite songs of all time. I love Michael Brecker but McCoy is incredible here as well obviously. It feels like they are just pulling music out of each other https://youtu.be/InshjZ9paQE

Steps Ahead, Radioactive :)

Jumping on the jazz recommendation bandwagon to submit 'Tom Scott - With Respect to Coltrane' https://youtube.com/watch?v=M6FKHnIBDxg

One interesting tidbit about "My Favorite Things" is that it came out several years before the movie [1]. So it was a Broadway hit, but not yet at the universally-known level the movie propelled it to.

[1] https://twitter.com/ethan_iverson/status/1479513450900377603

If I'm not mistaken that diagram comes from a legendary sax lesson he gave Yusef Lateef. It was the first lesson he gave Lateef and was apparently something like 8 hours long.

Thanks, there's some serious music theorists in HN, below thread has the vibe of type theory and topology/abstract algebra threads, i pondered over "non-homeomorphic embedding of chromatic circle into torus" for awhile and forgot about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16570489

i do remember being disappointed that he didn't write about any response from Y. Lateef:

https://medium.com/@lucas_gonze/coltrane-pitch-diagrams-e25b...

Reading all these comments in this thread has me adding all the suggestions to a playlist. I wish Apple Music would do for Jazz, what it did for Apple Classical Music.

I used to do my best to play many of the tunes Coltrane did. Never near as good as him, and when it came to Giant Steps, there was just no way. I kept trying as long as I played.

We should not forget “playing outside the changes,” or “playing out,” for short.

This concept was pioneered back in the 1950s and ’60s by innovative jazz legends John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and others.

I hope you didn't give up, there's 2 ways to approach this, start with a book of arpeggios and construct some kind of sound, and transcribing and making it your own.

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