My Favorite Things
How John Coltrane transformed a pop standard into a groove for the ages
This week I’m at the International Society for Music Education conference, which is by a wide margin the biggest academic conference I have ever been to. I’m going to present about teaching pop music theory and aural skills. While I’ve been mentally gearing up for it, I’ve been coming back to a song that I first encountered when we sang it in elementary school, “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.
Music teachers love this tune! As I type this, I’m listening to the Texas Tech steel drum band performing, and they just started playing it, in a hip 4/4 Latin arrangement. It’s everywhere!
I remember generally liking the song as a kid, but not feeling very strongly about it. I didn’t yet have the conceptual frameworks to appreciate its beautiful melody, the pairing of that melody with its syllable-heavy lyrics, or the nifty way it alternates minor and major. I definitely didn’t think much of the stiff oom-pah-pah rhythm. I forgot about the tune for several years, but then in high school I became obsessed with the Grateful Dead, and I started reading every interview I could with Jerry Garcia (not easy to do before the internet.) Jerry had great taste and talked a lot about his own musical inspirations, especially John Coltrane. So of course I had to go listen to John Coltrane. The first album I listened to was this one:
I did not get it, at all. A corny showtune being played on a soprano saxophone? For almost fourteen minutes? I associated soprano sax with Kenny G. I should probably have started with some more normal jazz; this recording turns out to be a very unconventional one, for reasons I will discuss in a minute. But Jerry said that this guy is important, so I kept listening. Eventually I did come to understand it, and then became obsessed. I ended up performed “My Favorite Things” in Coltrane’s arrangement about a thousand times with my jazz group, and have kept coming back to it regularly since then. Most recently, I edited together some of the most hypnotic grooves for my students and myself to practice improvising over.
If you are a Coltrane fan, then you already know “My Favorite Things” and why it’s important. I’m writing this post for people who are not deep into jazz, but who are curious about it, or who have heard people like me talk about Coltrane and are wondering why he’s such a big deal. To do that, let’s imagine that it’s March of 1961, and Coltrane’s My Favorite Things album has just come out. The Sound of Music has been running on Broadway for two years at this point, and it’s a big hit, but the movie won’t come out for another four years. The Broadway cast album was a major Billboard hit in 1960, though, so if you have any familiarity with “My Favorite Things”, it is probably from that.
Notice that Mary Martin sings the song even more squarely on the beat than Julie Andrews. This is not a promising basis for a jazz masterpiece. Nevertheless, when a song plugger gave Coltrane the sheet music after a gig, Coltrane was intrigued. In John Coltrane: His Life and Music, Lewis Porter says that Coltrane was under no label pressure to record this tune, and nor did he think it was in any way beneath him. To the contrary, Coltrane said that he “would love to have written it” (p. 182). He also said it was his favorite of his own recordings (p. 184). The public thought so too, because the record was a smash hit by the modest commercial standards of jazz.
Okay, fine, so Coltrane liked the tune enough to want to arrange and record it. But for almost fourteen minutes? That was an extraordinarily long performance to put on a record at the time (though Coltrane would soon start recording much longer performances.) The track isn’t just remarkable for its length, though; it’s also radical in its harmonic minimalism and open-ended structure. I struggle to imagine how it must have sounded when it first arrived. The best analogy I can think of would be if in 2017, Kendrick Lamar had released an avant-garde fourteen-minute reworking of “You’re Welcome” from Moana.
“My Favorite Things” must have had profound meaning for Coltrane, because he performed it constantly for the rest of his life. As a result, there are tons of live recordings in circulation. This one from 1963 is a scorcher. It has Roy Haynes on drums rather than Elvin Jones, which gives it a very different groove from the studio version—Roy plays with brushes!
This one from the same year has worse sound quality, but the performances are sensational.
European television did an excellent job presenting jazz in the 1960s, so you can see the Coltrane Quartet in action on Belgian (?) television in 1965.
Coltrane’s performances of the tune got steadily longer and wilder towards the end of his life. This recording from Japan in 1966 is almost an hour long.
Every recording of “My Favorite Things” is worth hearing—Coltrane never recorded a boring minute of music in his life—but the original recording is the canonical one, and rightly so. The rhythm section’s minimalism and focus contrast beautifully with Coltrane’s wildness. I’m going to walk you through the recording in detail, supported by several resources: this transcription of Coltrane’s solos by Cristinel Manascurta; and analyses of McCoy Tyner’s piano part by Thembi Dunjana and Aimee Nolte. I also draw heavily on Sami Linna’s dissertation, McCoy Tyner, Modal Jazz, and the Dominant Chord.
