On Tommy Flanagan (born March 16, 1930)
By Fritz Byers At the end of the 1950s, John Coltrane surveyed the departing decade and its admixture of swing, bebop, cool (and its sibling/cousin/offspring, West Coast jazz), hard bop, and whatever Miles Davis was up to that week, and thought it was time to say goodbye to all that (even to Miles’s modal masterwork, Kind of Blue, to which Coltrane contributed indispensably.) So he wrote “Giant Steps,” a tune whose chord structure and harmonic invitations are so dense, complex, and hectic that it would be difficult to play even if ‘Trane hadn’t chosen the br Read More
