The absence of a piano, along with a rhythm section playing with what Gary Giddins called "formidable concentration", allowed Coltrane to "stretch out" on "Chasin' the Trane". Coltrane stated that "the melody not only wasn't written but it wasn't even conceived before we played it. We set the tempo, and in we went." (Ratliff wrote that the piece "just vaults into being," and is "remarkable for the way it starts at absolute full intensity and retains that level without peaking or deflating.") According to Ratliff, in his solo, Coltrane "trips up the internal 12-bar logic. He causes patterns to change every bar, or stretches a single pattern across the 2nd and 3rd bar, or the 4th and 5th, or three in a row. In under a minute, Garrison, walking in hiccupped phrasing... loosens himself from the 12-bar structure; Coltrane (and Jones) still demarcate the end of the 12 bars by the beginning of a new melodic idea and an emphatic cymbal crash... at two and a half minutes in, Coltrane starts to disregard the 12-bar markers, and he's off, at large, exploring texture, fooling with short, sweet melodies..." Aspects of the solo reflect the influence of John Gilmore's "run-on language of short motivic cells", which Coltrane confirmed, stating: "I'd listened to John Gilmore kinda closely before I made 'Chasin' the Trane'... So some of those things on there are really direct influences of listening to this cat."