John Coltrane talked about his play­ing in edu­ca­tion­al terms, see­ing him­self as a stu­dent and, through his play­ing, as a teacher of new musi­cal forms and pos­si­bil­i­ties. His most endur­ing les­son may come from what some crit­ics call his first tru­ly icon­ic and most influ­en­tial album, 1960’s Giant Steps. On the record­ing’s title com­po­si­tion, Coltrane meant to chal­lenge him­self, and end­ed up chal­leng­ing gen­er­a­tions of musi­cians.

“The under­ly­ing har­mon­ic move­ment of Coltrane’s 16-bar com­po­si­tion — often called the ‘Coltrane Changes’ — has long been a set­tled mod­ule in jazz edu­ca­tion ped­a­gogy,” writes Stu­art Nichol­son in an essay for Jazz­wise. Cit­ing Coltrane schol­ar and biog­ra­ph­er Lewis Porter, Nichol­son calls the com­po­si­tion “effec­tive­ly an étude — or a thor­ough study — of third-relat­ed chord move­ment”: 26 chords and 10 key changes between 3 keys, B, G, and Eb.

This was new ter­ri­to­ry; with the title track to Giant Steps, Coltrane left the blues, which he’d stretched to the lim­it on Blue Train (his only record as a band­leader for Blue Note). He was recov­er­ing from his great­est life les­son — get­ting fired from Miles Davis’ band and get­ting clean — and fol­low­ing through on a real­iza­tion he’d had in the ear­ly fifties after join­ing Dizzy Gille­spie’s band: “What I did­n’t know with Diz,” he said, “was that what I had to do was real­ly express myself. You can only play so much of anoth­er man.”

Coltrane’s “oth­er man” was Char­lie Park­er, but as he moved away from Park­er as hero and began to study under Monk and Miles, he devel­oped his own impro­vi­sa­tion­al style, dubbed “sheets of sound,” and his own approach to play­ing chord pro­gres­sions: the “Coltrane changes.” On “Giant Steps,” Coltrane pushed the dia­ton­ic scale almost to break­ing (a cre­ative intu­ition giv­en that “dia­ton­ic” derives from a Greek word mean­ing “to stretch” or “extend”). Coltrane stretched, but he did­n’t pull his changes out of thin air.

Many of the ideas were already there in the canon — in Jerome Kern’s 1917 “Till the Clouds Roll By” and Duke Elling­ton’s “Blue Rose,” notes Carl Woideck for the Library of Con­gress. “Not rec­og­nized at the time, the sec­ond half of ‘Giant Steps’ was tak­en direct­ly from a pas­sage in the­o­rist Nico­las Slonim­sky’s ‘The­saurus of Scales and Melod­ic Pat­terns’ which vis­its the same three keys that the first half of Coltrane’s piece does.”

It took a mind and will like Coltrane’s to draw these threads togeth­er into the har­mon­ic com­plex­i­ty of “Giant Steps.” The com­po­si­tion’s “relent­less chord changes of key cre­ate a har­mon­ic obsta­cle course that is dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate, more so at this rapid tem­po,” Woideck writes. This is espe­cial­ly so for soloists, as pianist Tom­my Flana­gan found out when he almost lost the thread in his solo sec­tion.

In the visu­al­iza­tion above by Har­lan Broth­ers, we see Coltrane sail through his solo, bounc­ing off his band while they work through the changes. “Instead of just visu­al­iz­ing the sax solo,” writes Broth­ers, “I thought it would be super fun to be able to see how the entire quar­tet inter­act­ed,” includ­ing Flana­gan, bassist Paul Cham­bers, and drum­mer Art Tay­lor. See Coltrane’s changes hit like col­ored drops of rain in a down­pour in the ani­ma­tion and learn more about how it was made at Broth­er’s YouTube page.

Coltrane’s com­plex­i­ty is daunt­ing for the most accom­plished musi­cians. How much more so for non-musi­cians? It can seem like “you need a doc­tor­ate of music to go any­where near his record­ings,” Nichol­son writes. But “noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.” With its danc­ing lines and cir­cles, Broth­er’s visu­al­iza­tion gives us anoth­er way to appre­ci­ate the “sheer joy of music mak­ing and the pow­er and ener­gy of his play­ing” that inspires stu­dents, seri­ous fans, and new­com­ers alike through “uni­ver­sal val­ues that still speak to us now.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How John Coltrane Intro­duced the World to His Rad­i­cal Sound in the Ground­break­ing Record­ing of “My Favorite Things”

John Coltrane Talks About the Sacred Mean­ing of Music in the Human Expe­ri­ence: Lis­ten to One of His Final Inter­views (1966)

John Coltrane Draws a Mys­te­ri­ous Dia­gram Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­i­cal & Mys­ti­cal Qual­i­ties of Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Kate Bush has been lying in wait for us on this side of the mil­len­ni­um – espe­cial­ly for those of us on the U.S. side of the pond, who paid too lit­tle atten­tion when she became pop roy­al­ty in the UK (and Japan!) at the turn of the 80s.

Bush was too quirky, too British, and maybe too much her own woman for U.S. audi­ences, maybe. But now they’re ready. Final­ly, in the mil­lions, Amer­i­cans are catch­ing up to the bril­liance of her 1985 sin­gle “Run­ning Up That Hill” thanks to its res­ur­rec­tion by Stranger Things Sea­son 4.

Thus far, the Inter­net has pre­ferred her ear­ly stuff. Her first album and its epony­mous sin­gle, Wuther­ing Heights, gar­nered atten­tion online because of its beloved, bizarre video, an inspi­ra­tion to Kate fans world­wide. 1979 was the last time that she toured and the last time she appeared onstage until a 2015 come­back appear­ance.

Bush relied on elab­o­rate music films to car­ry her image. Her ear­ly turn to video, we might say, helped make her a cult favorite when she declined to be a celebri­ty for a few decades. Now video has killed the tour­ing super­star, and Bush is an Amer­i­can pop queen.

In 2022 — almost 40 years after its release — “Run­ning Up That Hill” has hit No 1 on the Hot Bill­board 100 Song­writ­ers charts, the first song by a female artist to top the chart this year. Her 1985 album Hounds of Love has become Bush’s first Bill­board No. 1 album, this sum­mer, rank­ing at the top for alter­na­tive albums and No. 2 for top rock albums.

“Run­ning Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” first peaked at No. 3 on British charts in 1985. The  album, Hounds of Love — one of her very best among a long string of great records — was hailed as “f**ing” bril­liant” by NME. “Our Kate’s a genius, the rarest solo artist this coun­try’s ever pro­duced,” wrote Jane Solanas.

Over here in the States, we were hard­ly unaware of Kate. Although “Run­ning Up That Hill” only hit No. 30 on the charts, her music con­tin­ued to thrive in under­ground scenes yet unmea­sured by sales and chart posi­tions. (Hounds of Love’s “Cloud­bust­ing” invad­ed U.S. raves and clubs in 1992 via sam­ples in British group Utah Saints’ “Some­thing Good,” a song most peo­ple heard on sketchy dance floors and rat­ty cas­sette mix­tapes).

As for the main­stream U.S. press, well… “The Mis­tress of Mys­ti­cism has woven anoth­er album that both daz­zles and bores,” wrote a Rolling Stone crit­ic in 1985. “Her vision will seem sil­ly to those who believe chil­dren should be seen and not heard.” A New York Times’ review called Hounds of Love “slight­ly pre­cious, cal­cu­lat­ed female art rock.”

There’s noth­ing slight about Kate Bush’s work, but Cheers to the sounds of f***ing bril­liant chil­dren at work. See why Bush’s revival — or endur­ing stay­ing pow­er — should come as no sur­prise in the Poly­phon­ic video above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kate Bush Enjoys a (Long-Over­due) Revival, Sparked by Sea­son 4 of Stranger Things

Revis­it Kate Bush’s Pecu­liar Christ­mas Spe­cial, Fea­tur­ing Peter Gabriel (1979)

300 Kate Bush Imper­son­ators Pay Trib­ute to Kate Bush’s Icon­ic “Wuther­ing Heights” Video

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The high­est qual­i­ty clas­si­cal gui­tars hand­made in the 21st cen­tu­ry can run into the tens of thou­sands of dol­lars. This is no friv­o­lous expense for a pro­fes­sion­al play­er. Put such an instru­ment in the hands of an ama­teur and you may not hear much dif­fer­ence between it and a $150 fac­to­ry-made bud­get mod­el. In the hands of a sea­soned play­er, a high-end gui­tar tru­ly sings. Tone resides in the fin­gers — or 90% of it any­way — but a skilled gui­tarist knows how to dis­cov­er and make use of all an instru­men­t’s best qual­i­ties. For a musi­cian who makes a liv­ing doing so, spend­ing the cost of a car on a gui­tar makes eco­nom­ic sense (as does a good insur­ance pol­i­cy).

The tonal qual­i­ties of the instru­ment below, a hand­made clas­si­cal gui­tar from 1888, are clear­ly abun­dant; it’s also clear that gui­tarist Bran­don Ack­er — who has appeared in many of our pre­vi­ous posts on the gui­tar — knows how to exploit them. At times, he brings out such rich res­o­nance, the instru­ment sounds like a piano; at oth­ers, it is almost harp-like. We have a con­flu­ence of rar­i­ty: a high­ly skilled play­er with deep knowl­edge of clas­si­cal stringed instru­ments, and an instru­ment like no oth­er — so rare, in fact, that it’s val­ued at over a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars, rough­ly the aver­age cost of a mod­er­ate­ly-priced house in the U.S., the largest invest­ment most peo­ple make in their life­time.

To under­stand why the instru­ment car­ries such a high price tag, see Ack­er and YouTu­ber and gui­tarist Rob Scal­lon vis­it with father-and-son luthi­er team R.E. and M.E. Bruné at their shops in Illi­nois in the video at the top. The Brunés are spe­cial­ists in clas­si­cal and fla­men­co gui­tars. (The elder Bruné tells a charm­ing sto­ry of mak­ing his first fla­men­co gui­tar for him­self from his par­ents’ first din­ing room table.) In their shop’s stor­age area, they have ready access to some of the rarest gui­tars in the world, and they give us a live­ly tour — start­ing with a “bit of a let­down,” the “low-end,” 1967 Daniel Friederich con­cert mod­el val­ued at $50,000.

In Ack­er’s hands, each gui­tar deliv­ers the full poten­tial of its sus­tain and res­o­nance. Final­ly, at 16:00, we come to the 1888 Anto­nio de Tor­res gui­tar val­ued at $275,000. There are many old­er gui­tars in exis­tence, even gui­tars made by Anto­nio Stradi­vari and his heirs. But it was this gui­tar, or one of the few oth­ers made by the leg­endary Tor­res around the same time, that rev­o­lu­tion­ized what a gui­tar looked and sound­ed like. When Andrés Segovia arrived on stages play­ing his Tor­res, the Brunés tell us, gui­tarists around the world decid­ed that the old style, small-bod­ied gui­tars in use for cen­turies were obso­lete.

There are per­haps 90 to 100 of the Tor­res clas­si­cal gui­tars in exis­tence, and this extrav­a­gant­ly-priced num­ber 124 is “as close as you’re going to get to orig­i­nal,” says the elder Bruné, while his son makes the fas­ci­nat­ing obser­va­tion, “old­er instru­ments that have been played a lot, espe­cial­ly by great play­ers… learn the music.” Ack­er express­es his sur­prise at the “sweet­ness” of the very touch of the gui­tar.

If you had attend­ed the 2016 Gui­tar Foun­da­tion of Amer­i­ca con­fer­ence in Den­ver, where M.E. Bruné exhib­it­ed sev­er­al of his shop’s rare gui­tars, you would have been able to play the Tor­res your­self — or even pur­chase it for the less­er price of $235,000.

In the video inter­view above from the GFA con­fer­ence, M.E. Bruné describes the year plus-long restora­tion process on the gui­tar, one that involved some dis­as­sem­bly, extra brac­ing, and a replace­ment fin­ger­board, but pre­served the beau­ti­ful spruce and bird­s­eye maple of the gui­tar, wood that “does­n’t grow on trees like this any­where” these days, says Bruné. It is, he says, “the best-sound­ing Tor­res” he’s ever heard. Com­ing from some­one who has heard, and restored, the sweet­est-sound­ing gui­tars in exis­tence, that’s say­ing a lot. $275,000 worth? Maybe. Or maybe it’s impos­si­bly arbi­trary to put any price on such an arti­fact.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Musi­cians Play the Only Playable Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World: The “Sabionari”

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar: See the Evo­lu­tion of the Gui­tar in 7 Instru­ments

The Art of Mak­ing a Fla­men­co Gui­tar: 299 Hours of Blood, Sweat & Tears Expe­ri­enced in 3 Min­utes

Encore! Encore! An Hour of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Clas­si­cal Gui­tar

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness