60 years of My Favourite Things

[aukhawk]

60 years ago, on 21st October, John Coltrane led his quartet into the studio to lay down My Favourite Things.

This track had a far more immediate and powerful effect on me as an adolescent, than anything else in jazz.  Even so I was probably 3 or 4 years late coming to My Favourite Things.  Up to that point my jazz awareness was limited to the Modern Jazz Quartet (who I had seen live near my home in South London UK) and to a lesser extent Thelonious Monk (who I also saw live, but maybe a bit after my Favourite Things moment in the mid-60s).  I didn't clock Kind of Blue and the other great Miles Davis albums (with and without Coltrane) until a good 10 years later.



This was not the 'great' Coltrane quartet yet, without Jimmy Garrison on bass and with Elvin Jones not yet in full flow on the drums.  (To hear the great quartet listen to A Love Supreme.)
My Favourite Things - such a trite song lifted from a rather trite musical - transformed by Coltrane's sheets-of-sound soprano and McCoy Tyner's piano into a hypnotic dervish dance.  I was already beginning to get into Indian music (a major interest ever since) and JC's soprano sax was very close to the Indian shenhai, an oboe-ish instrument associated with ceremonials, actually JC's soprano went places I had never heard a shenhai go.  I was impressed.

This track revolutionised my musical mind.  I will admit, it hasn't aged all that well, so much more has happened since.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Yes, significant recording with significant ideas/approach. Plus, the song evolved magnificently in years later.  All the live versions, ie. Newport, Stockholm, Paris, sound excellent. Trane recorded, and played live, Greensleeves with a similar (modal) approach. I like it, but I guess he didn't keep playing it.