I knew someone would eventually jump on this anniversary idea (it's been around in the classical and the wider arts field forever) and I do prefer Coltrane to celebrating Beethoven's birth or the death of Bach. Of course, the basic tracks are actually 61 years old, since this reissue roughly coincides with the album's release, not its recording – while some of the alternate takes on the second disc didn't appear till 1974, or in three cases, 1995. But the music is still a blast, and contrasts intriguingly with the almost simultaneous Kind of Blue, even if its influence may have been more problematic in the long run.

Unlike KOB, Steps found Trane displaying his more demanding harmonic researches of the previous few years. (The reason he was catching up in documenting them was that his affiliation with Atlantic allowed him the publishing royalties from original compositions, which his previous label Prestige didn't). Thus, the then novel chord-sequence of the title track is also incorporated into the faster ‘Countdown’, and it supplies the opening three harmonies of the altered blues ‘Cousin Mary’. But already the use of pedal-points to underpin the chord-changes on sections of ‘Spiral’ and ‘Naima’ meant that harmonically complex improv would soon be restricted to sax and piano, while the layout of ‘Syeeda's Song Flute’ can be heard as a half­way stage.

The technicalities of the reissue mean that I've reviewed the 2CD/2LP edition, with the issued album as the first disc. The outtakes are complete performances, except for the very first ‘Giant Steps’ with Walton (on one of his earliest NYC recordings), which peters out after a long tenor solo – but which doesn't include the studio conversation before and after, as heard on the 1995 Heavyweight Champion box set. Note that a complete ‘GS’ from the Walton session is not the same one first issued on 1974's Alternate Takes album. The four outtakes here from the original album sessions with Flanagan do include the extra ‘GS’ done after the master take, and the sensational ‘Countdown’ that has a much longer section of just tenor and drums (which would of course soon be explored with Elvin Jones). The downloadable Super Deluxe Digital Edition promises absolutely all of the 1995-released outtakes, many of them incomplete or false starts. Whether or not you're bothered by such Coltrane minutiae, if you never heard these tracks before, you sure do need to hear and own them now.