Naima

I’ve been doing so much explaining basic music theory that I thought it would be fun to dig into something advanced: “Naima” by John Coltrane, from his all-killer-no-filler album Giant Steps.

There are as many interpretations of this tune’s chord changes as there are transcriptions of it. The ones in the Real Book are real wrong. I hear the chords in The New Real Book Volume II as sounding correct. Fortunately, there’s a surviving manuscript in Coltrane’s own hand, and it confirms the New Real Book version, with a few trivial differences.

Handwritten chart of

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