My Favourite Things About My Favourite Things

There are a few ‘big’ jazz albums that might find their way into your average rock fans music collection: Dave Brubeck’s ‘Time Out’, Herbie Hancock’s ‘Headhunters’,  Miles Davis’ ‘Kind of Blue’ and John Coltrane’s ‘My Favourite Things’. These are albums that have become so ubiquitous that they’ve risen above being ‘merely’ a jazz album and are now considered classic enough to sit next to the Beatles, Marvin Gaye or Radiohead in the popular music canon. They are jazz gateway drug albums, that open up the jazz door and leave it swinging enticingly open.

‘My Favourite Things’ is probably best known from the 1966 Julie Andrews film ‘The Sound of Music’ , but in 1961 Coltrane would have heard the song from the broadway version which was hugely popular at the time. Coltrane’s original studio recording of ‘My Favourite Things’ takes a pretty song with a melancholy melody and elongates it to a nearly fourteen minute long ecstatic mini-symphony by the use of extended two chord vamps. His assault on and reconstruction of ‘My Favourite Things’ is thorough and complete; it is an extraordinary piece of music. The mood is by turns introspective, restrained, and almost devotional, at other points it is joyous, euphoric, and transcendent, and there are many moments of exquisite beauty. By the end of it you feel as though you have travelled through an entire country of sound and mood.

So just what is it about ‘My Favourite Things’ that make is such an evergreen piece of music, revered over fifty five years after it was first recorded?

‘My Favourite Things’ was innovative in a number of ways. Coltrane was famous as a tenor saxophone player, but for ‘My Favourite Things’ he used a soprano sax instead, a smaller instrument without the characteristics curves of its bigger relatives the alto, tenor and baritone. The soprano was seldom used in jazz at the and Coltrane presented an entirely new approach to the instrument. In his meticulous ‘John Coltrane: His Life and Music’, jazz scholar Professor Lewis Porter notes: “For years he’d been pushing the upper limits of this tenor, as if yearning for en extended range and a buzzing, more exotic tone.” Porter report that Miles Davis famously bought Coltrane a soprano sax “…from a woman I knew in Paris, an antique dealer” in March 1960. The soprano saxophone presented the creatively restless Coltrane with another set of challenges for him to work with and overcome and he became fascinated with the possibilities it presented. In his autobiography Miles Davis states: “After he got that [soprano] horn his style changed. After that, he didn't sound like nobody but himself. He found out that he could play lighter and faster on the soprano than he could on the tenor…when he played the soprano, after a while it sounded almost like a human voice, wailing.”

What is remarkable is Coltrane’s ability to reach such a high technical level of competence on the soprano in such a relatively short time. The album was released in March 1961 while the earliest reports of Coltrane playing soprano were only in early 1959, although he may have begun experimenting with a friends soprano in Autumn of 1958. But then, Coltrane was famous for practising relentlessly and would head off the bandstand at gigs during the band’s break to go and practice in the mens room. Miles again: “After the gigs he would go back to his hotel room and practice while everybody else was hanging out. He would practice for hours after he had just got through playing three sets” This commitment no doubt resulted in the speedy mastery of the soprano that is demonstrated on ‘My Favourite Things’.

Coltrane’s playing here is breathtaking. He takes an idea and restlessly explores it, turns it inside out and re-presents it, all within a few moments. His playing is intricate, fervid and cascading, with phrases from his solos so memorable that they’re like little refrains from entirely new unwritten songs.

The structure of Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favourite Things’ was radical too. For this project, he adopted the modal approach pioneered by Miles Davis on ‘Milestones’ and ‘Kind of Blue’. Jazz had traditionally been played over the chord changes from popular songs. Miles’ ‘modal thing’ was to stop running through endless chord changes and instead just dwell on one or two chords. This enabled the soloist to be freer and less restricted by the harmonic structure of a song. Porter notes that the modal style of playing, facilitates a particular type of creative tension: “The repetitive patterns of the piano and bass … creates a feeling of organised stasis, which the extremely active soprano and piano create the opposite effect, of change and a sense of searching.” This yearning, striving aspect is also clearly apparent in  the new Eastern and Arabic ideas of harmony that Coltrane brings to his solos, giving some of the minor sections a sense of exotic placelessness.

The lack of harmonic cycles and extended vamps also subtlety altered the sense of progression that results from a song’s chords playing out; there is less predictability, less inevitability to the forward motion of the song, instead there is a kind of timelessness, inviting the soloists to languidly stretch out.

Each vamp starts in a minor key and then moves into a major - for readers unfamiliar with music theory, this essentially means that the two soloists play over a brooding, thoughtful melancholy pair of chords before signalling to the band by restating the main theme to switch up to more joyous, bright chords. The effect of this is like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, providing a musical lift and it is during these parts that Coltrane’s playing is at his most expressive, producing some unforgettable phrases, demonstrating his manual dexterity by jumping across octaves and taking wide leaps between notes, his horn at times sounding like birdsong.

With ‘My Favourite Things’, Coltrane and his band transformed the unlikely source material into something extraordinary, into a a rushing, dervish of a thing, a rolling great ball of beauty and power. Coltrane cut his teeth working with the very best including a few years as Miles Davis’ tenor sax player. In the early 1970s, writer Ralph Gleeson commented to Miles that his jazz fusion music was so complex he needed five tenor players. “He shot those eyes at me and growled. ‘I had five tenor players once.’ I knew what he meant.” Listen to Coltrane’s original studio recording of ‘My Favourite Things’ and you’ll know what he meant too.

References 

Porter, Lewis, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (University of Michigan Press 1998)

Davis, Miles, with Troupe, Quincy, Miles: The Autobiography (Picador 1990)

Griffin, Farah Jasmine, Washington, Salim, Clawing at the Limits of Cool (St. Martin’s Press 2008)

Harold Heath is a freelance writer who contributes to iDJ Magazine, Thump, Ministry of Sound, Traxsource etc. When not writing words about music, Harold is a DJ, producer and music tech teacher.