Most improvisers spend years collecting licks and still feel like they’re borrowing someone else’s voice. The Coltrane Approach is built to close that gap. It’s a ten-week practice method for saxophonists who want a system for generating their own jazz vocabulary, not another book of patterns to memorise.
The method is drawn from the way John Coltrane practised between 1957 and 1959, the two years that produced Giant Steps, Countdown, and the harmonic world that now bears his name. One idea runs through all of it: every strong jazz line is a skeleton, the notes that carry the harmony, plus decoration around those notes. Learn the skeletons, learn the three ways to decorate them, and you can build lines for the rest of your playing life.
Ten classes, one method
The book is ten short classes, designed to be worked through one per week. Class one lays out the core idea. Classes two to five walk through the four symmetrical sound-worlds Coltrane drilled: major thirds, tritones, diminished, and whole tones. Class six puts the method in your hands so you can build your own patterns. The final classes cover rhythm, modal playing, and how to make it all stick, ending with a composition assignment that proves you’ve absorbed it.
Rooted in the Slonimsky tradition
Coltrane was known to practise from Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, a dense catalogue of symmetrical scales and lines. The Coltrane Approach takes that tradition and makes it practical, boiling it down to a single repeatable engine you can use at the music stand. Giant Steps becomes a worked example, its melody revealed as a decorated arpeggio you can hear and play.
Who it’s for
This is for the improviser who wants a system. If you can already play your scales and want to understand how modern jazz harmony is built from the inside, it will give you a generative method that keeps producing material long after the ten weeks are done.
Read each class, take it to the horn, and practise slowly. Ten minutes a day beats an hour once a week.
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