The Giant Steps Between Two Sax Giants A 60’s tenor saxophonist plays a torrential, nasally lick on a lush, eastern-sounding mode. If one were to describe this to jazz aficionados, they would think that you have described one of two musicians: John Coltrane or Wayne Shorter. On the surface, this is a fair comparison, but if one were to attempt to differentiate between them, he or she would find some fundamental differences that lie with their improvisational techniques, and the direction of their compositions. John Coltrane had a natural tendency to push harmony to its limits. Even on his earlier, less experimental albums such as Blue Train, he had improvised with techniques that get dangerously close to breaking the fundamentals of music theory. …show more content…
Wayne Shorter does have a sound that emulates Coltrane’s. In fact, closely after Kind of Blue was released, John Coltrane was kicked out of the quintet by Miles Davis, and as a replacement, Wayne Shorter was enlisted. Shorter complemented by Miles Davis Quintet into their eventual forays of modal jazz, and although he didn’t do it to the same degree that Coltrane did, he still brought experimental harmony to the quintet. With his improvisational styles, Shorter eventually became a part of what was later known as Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. Some jazz listeners even consider Miles Smiles to be a Wayne Shorter album because of how dominant he is on it. Overall, Shorter did have similar traits to Coltrane in improvisation, but his more subdued experimentation allowed him to play more consistently as a …show more content…
That is not saying that modality is not experimental in nature. One would notice a huge different when comparing Coltranes modal take on My Favorite Things to the original broadway show-tune. In his experimentations as a composer, Coltrane managed to compose “Giant Steps”, which became notorious for its difficulty. Composing tunes for regular jazz bands to play was not at all Coltrane’s goal, and this was illustrated in his magnum opus A Love Supreme, an epic four-part suite that was more invigorated with the avant-garde than any album released before it. If one were to glance at the rest of Coltrane’s discography, they would see albums such as Interstellar Space, a free-jazz album with the set-up of only a drummer and saxophonist, and realize that Coltrane's end-game was pushing jazz to its limits, whether the crowds liked it or