understanding coltrane changes part 1 — www.learnjazzstandards

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Understanding Coltrane ChangesPart 1

May 1, 2015 3 min read original

Coltrane Changes.If youve been playing jazz for a while and havereally gotten deep into it, youve probably had to confront them. Atsome point youve attempted to play Giant Steps at a jam session oreven by yourself at home and had to learn the hard lesson: its noteasy!

Sure playing tunes like Giant Steps, Satellite, Countdown, or 26-2 canbe quite a challenge, but like any other tunes you just need to practicethem.

But where do you start? A lot of musicians like to go straight toshedding scales, arpeggios, and patterns over all of Coltranesharmonically complex forms. After all, thats the hard part right: justbeing able to sound good when soloing over the changes?

However in order to set yourself up for success, you need to firstunderstand Coltrane Changes. A lot of musicians skip this step andend up making it so much harder than it really is. It can be helpful totake a step back from your instrument and analyze whats going on.

In this lesson were going to look at 2 fundamentaltypesof ColtraneChanges that you need to understand before moving forward toothers: the Three Tonic System and the Four Tonic System. In thenext post well talk about how you can apply Coltrane Changes todifferent jazz standards, but for now this is a necessary starting point.



Three Tonic SystemRealize that Coltrane Changes are all about cycles. Its incrediblyimportant to understand what these cycles are and how they work.What is being cycled? Different key centers. Lets start by talkingabout theThree Tonic System.

Three Tonic System essentially means there are 3 different tonalcenters present in the cycle.

There are different kinds of Three Tonic Systems as youll see in thenext lesson, but for now lets focus on Giant Steps.

Here is the rule for a Three Tonic System based on Giant Steps: Eachkey center descends in Major 3rds.

Lets take a look at the first three bars of Giant Steps:

Notice that in Giant Steps the three tonal centers are: B Major, GMajor, and Eb Major.

Now in case you dont find this fascinating: understanding thatGiant Steps can be simplified to three keys makes thinking aboutit much easier!

Lets take another look at these first three bars and see how the rule(Each key center descends in Major 3rds)shows up in thesechanges:



As you can see, Bmaj7 is moving to Gmaj7 which is a major 3rd downand Gmaj7 is moving to Ebmaj7 which is a major 3rd down. Thismovement in thirds (major or minor) is really what characterizesmost allColtrane Changes.

Notice as well that each key center moves up to a dominant 7 chord aminor 3rdaway (Bmaj7-D7).

Why does this work? Notice that the D7 is the V chord of G and noticehow Bb7 is the V chord of Eb. If youve been paying attention to yourii-V-Is, you already know that the V chord resolves perfectly to the Ichord.

Lets take a look now at the entire form of Giant Steps and analyze thiseven further:



First note that the entire form keeps going in this same cycle: Bmaj7-Gmaj7-Ebmaj7-Bmaj7-Gmaj7-Ebmaj7..etc.It sticks to the therule of the key centers moving down in Major 3rds.

Youll notice that for the sake of the piece, Coltrane doesntcontinually connect the tonal centers with dominant 7 chords a minor3rd up (or the V chord of the next tonal center). If he did, there wouldbe a constant attack of 2 beats per chord and no space.

To deal with that he starts adding ii-Vsto connect tonal centers. Mysuggestion is to think of the ii-V-I of the next tonal center as a wholeand dont worry about the exact minor 7 chord that comes after thetonal center you are currently on.

If you understand the cycle and realize you are only dealing with threedifferent keys, Giant Steps automatically becomes much easier tonavigate.

Four Tonic SystemColtrane also utilized a Four Tonic System in his music.



If you havent concluded already, a Four Tonic Systems means thereare4 different tonal centers present in the cycle. Again there aredifferent types of Four Tonic Systems, and each tune has its own wayof cycling.

A good example of a Four Tonic System is Central Park West.

Here is the general rule for a Four Tonic System based on CentralPark West: Each key center modulatesby minor 3rds (up or down).

Now the reason I say general ruleis because Coltrane doesntcompletely follow this.

In this tune the keycenters are: B Major, D Major, F Major and AbMajor. Notice how these key centers modulate up by minor 3rds.But Coltrane throws a little bit of a curve ball at us. Take a look at thefirst 6 bars:

He starts the tune modulating a minor 3rd up (Bmaj7-Dmaj7)butthen decides to switch the order of the key centers and moves toAbmaj7 instead of the Fmaj7 after the Dmajor (which are a tritoneapart from each other). This causes theFmaj7 at the end of the cycleto be a minor 3rd down from the Abmaj7.



He connects the 4 different key centers by ii-Vs into eachproceedingkey, much like he did in the last half of Giant Steps.

In summaryIf you understand what the cycle and the key centers are in eachColtrane Changes tune you are already on the right path. Focus in onthe key centers and the tune will be easier to digest.

In the next lesson well talk about how Coltrane applied his ColtraneChanges to popular jazz standards such as Tune-Up andConfirmation. As always, check our blog often.

-Brent Vaartstra

Learn more about the author by visiting www.brentvaartstra.com

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understanding coltrane changes part 1 — www.learnjazzstandards

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