Vox
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2025
10:50 · 11M views · Nov 12, 2018
Vox Earworm explains why John Coltrane's Giant Steps is so hard to improvise over: it is fast and moves through three keys. Musicians Braxton Cook and Adam Neely walk the host through the underlying music theory.
Recommended as a well-produced, accessible explanation of Giant Steps and the harmonic ideas behind Coltrane's work.
5 comments from Hacker News
I highly recommend this Vox explainer on John Coltrane's "Giant Steps", for anyone interested in learning about the math behind one of Jazz' greatest innovations. this video
I keep a Google Document of these to share just in case people ask about my YouTube interests. I Actually Watched All of Them I have actually watched ALL of the videos on these channels and I don’t even feel bad about it :-) I actually like new videos from some of the ones below (like NativLang, for example) but they maybe don’t hold up in the early videos. - Space Time: PBS Physics, sooo good -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - Lindsay Ellis: Really, really intelligent video essays about film and culture -- [LINK] -- Great First Video: [LINK] - Periodic Videos: Chemistry, including a video for every element -- [LINK] -- Great first video (obviously): [LINK] Other Math and Science - 3Blue1Brown: Amazing math visualizations -- [LINK] -- Great first video, how e^pi*i works: [LINK] - NumberPhile: Fun math videos -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - PBS Eons: Biology! -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - PBS Infinite Series: Math math math, really really hard math -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - SciShow: Science! More poppy but fun -- [LINK] -- Silly first show: [LINK] -- Actual physics: [LINK] - VSauce: Science-y? -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - Practical Engineering: -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] Other Humanities - Alliterative: Connections via language -- [LINK] -- Great first video about gin and gimlets: [LINK] - Bon Appetit: Such fun food stuff! -- Gourmet Makes: [LINK] -- It’s Alive: [LINK] - Masaman: Genetics and human migration (and
Nice site but we're at the point in "Show an In Depth Thing on Hacker News" where circles like these need to be presented with a live GUI that includes sound and colors as you spin the circles around to play different chords. towards my craving for instant gratification with sound and lights I found a well produced video by Vox on the subject: this video
If you don’t have the time (or the musical background) for the full article, this short YouTube video touches on some of the same ideas in a much more condensed and accessible version: this video
If you're looking for a comprehensible to mortals explanation of the genius that can be found in Jazz, watch this explainer on Coltrane's Giant Steps. this video