John Coltrane’s Giant Steps Now Considered Smooth Jazz After Someone Heard It on a Subway Speaker
A viral clip of a man grooving to “Giant Steps” on a tinny subway speaker has divided music historians, jazz purists, and your uncle who thinks Kenny G is “too avant-garde.” The irony? The notoriously complex, chord-dense masterpiece—often cited as the hardest jazz standard to improvise over—has been memed into existence as the new “elevator music,” proving that if you play Coltrane fast enough through a low-bitrate speaker, it sounds exactly like someone stepping on a cat. “It’s like a car alarm that somehow has a PhD in harmony,” one Reddit user posted, as the internet collectively wonders whether we’ve been gatekeeping jazz wrong this whole time or if the subway simply killed all nuance.