It’s been nearly 60 years since John Coltrane’s death, but Mike Bauer has made sure the legendary musician’s legacy lives on in Chattanooga.
Bauer launched Giant Steps Music Corp. in 1977 and remains at its helm today. He says he settled on the name during a saxophone lesson he was taking at the Hixson home of his private teacher, Ed Leamon.
“Ed said ‘You’re not leaving until we come up with a name for your store,'” Bauer says. “So we spread all his jazz records on the floor, looked at them and finally came up with ‘Giant Steps.’
The title track “starts off a little slow, then goes crazy,” he adds.
Bauer says Giant Steps was strictly a repair shop until 1983, when he got into retail and rentals. All told, he says, the store generates a bit more than $1 million in annual revenues.
Andy Bailey, the store’s vice president and Bauer’s nephew, says Giant Steps handles wind and string instruments made by Yamaha and Eastman, as well as Jupiter-brand wind instruments.
“I just counted the other day, and we had 300 wind instruments for sale, from student (level) to top-of-the-line for professionals,” Bailey says. “Probably another 100 or so string instruments, including seven basses.
“Sixty percent of what we do is related to school bands and orchestras,” he says, adding that musicians have come from as far as Arkansas looking for just the right instrument.
“One (musician) flew into Atlanta and drove up here for an oboe,” he says. “There aren’t many wind stores between Atlanta and Nashville or Knoxville — we’re trying to be a destination music store.”
To that end, Bailey says, Giant Steps has recently expanded — not its Hixson Pike building, to which it moved in 1983 from its original Dayton Boulevard location, but in terms of personnel. He says the aim is to raise awareness with directors of school bands and orchestras.
“We had one rep on the road until 2018,” Bailey says. “When he died, we hired three more.
“We’re hitting that pretty hard — we’re branching out towards Knoxville, and maybe a little north; and south to Dalton and Rome, and we get calls from the Atlanta area,” he says. “We want to see what (directors’) needs are and whether there’s anything we can do to help.”
But for all its success in the rental and retail realm, Giant Steps still has its original mission, instrument repair, at its core. Bauer says he started fixing instruments while he was a Red Bank High School student, working with tools belonging to his father, who’d served in the military as an airplane mechanic.
“I’m pretty much self-taught,” Bauer says. “I’ve still got, and still use, the first bench motor I ever bought, 55 years ago.”
Bauer estimates that the shop’s repair equipment alone might be worth a half-million dollars. He says he made and modified a lot of it, and many of those pieces are unique.
“In a lot of cases, the technology is 100 years old,” he says, “but it’s still the best.”
Bauer says he spends a lot of time in his home workshop and is trying to get back to playing his saxophone more. He allows that it’s “hard to say” when he might retire and turn Giant Steps over to his nephew.
“I don’t want to go forever,” he says, “but I feel like if I stop, I’d just die soon, and I’m not interested in doing that right now.”