"My Favorite Things" -- John Coltrane (1961)

This one wanders a little from our usual home of Soul, R&B, Funk and Gospel song-telling. It’s for my brother-in-law — a jazz-loving bongo player, and someone I loved — who we lost this week.

The first thing you hear is the cymbal. Elvin Jones on drums hits it once, and the note hangs there like a question that already knows its answer. Then Coltrane on soprano saxophone enters, and the tune everybody knew from a Broadway stage starts to bend. By the time McCoy Tyner on piano locks in, the song has become something else entirely: a 14-minute modal meditation that shares almost nothing with the Rodgers and Hammerstein original except the melody — and even that is played differently, held longer, stretched past the point where the ear expects it to resolve.

People who write about this recording tend to start with the room. The address is well documented: 234 West 56th Street, Atlantic Studios, late October 1960. The engineer Tom Dowd arrived that day to find Coltrane already there, standing alone in the corner of an empty studio, playing scales into the dead air, cycling through mouthpieces like a carpenter testing planes against a block of wood. Dowd later said all he had to do was capture what the hell they were doing. The quartet had been playing together since May — Tyner on piano, Steve Davis on bass bowing a single open E string for the entire 13 minutes and 41 seconds of the title track, Elvin Jones on drums riding the cymbal on the "and of one" — a rhythmic displacement that created its own gravitational field. The room matters, but what happened inside it matters more.

Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote "My Favorite Things" for The Sound of Music in 1959, their final collaboration. On the Broadway cast recording, Mary Martin sang it in 2 minutes and 45 seconds. The song was a midtempo waltz about finding joy in ordinary objects — raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles. Harmless. Charming. A piece of musical theater designed to warm an audience before the curtain came down.

But look closer at what Rodgers actually built. Most show tunes of that era stayed safely in a major key. Rodgers wrote the verses in a crisp E minor. The bridge shifts to the relative major, and the song ends with a Picardy-third turn to E major — a moment of harmonic sunshine that lands differently when you hear where it started. That built-in major-minor duality, the way the same melody can sit over two different emotional centers, was the feature Coltrane seized on. He stripped the song down to those two modal plateaus — E minor and E major — and parked there, refusing to follow the chord changes back to G major where the song was supposed to go. Tyner played open quartal harmonies, fourth-based chords that floated like clouds over the static bass. Jones stayed up high, his cymbal work creating a rhythmic dissonance so persistent it became a new kind of consonance. The result was not a cover. It was a reclamation.

Music scholars have studied this recording from almost every angle. Ingrid Monson, in her book Saying Something, devotes an entire chapter to the quartet’s interaction on this track, arguing that what the rhythm section does is not accompaniment but conversation — Tyner’s left hand speaking in chords, Jones’s cymbal answering in pulses, Davis anchoring the whole architecture on a single note. Lewis Porter’s biography of Coltrane includes rigorous note-for-note transcriptions of the solos, showing how Coltrane moved from playing the changes to playing the space between them. Michael Titlestad, writing in English Studies in Africa, calls the melody a “departure point and a touchstone” — a safe recognizable anchor that Coltrane used to ground his increasingly volatile explorations. Some scholars have even read the recording as an act of civil disobedience, a Black avant-garde musician taking a white Broadway standard and reshaping it so completely that the original became almost unrecognizable. They use Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s theory of Signifyin(g) to frame it: parody, irony, and pastiche as the tools of cultural reclamation.

The soprano saxophone made it possible. Earlier that year, during a European tour, Miles Davis walked into a music shop and bought a soprano sax. It was not for himself. It was for Coltrane, who had been pushing the boundaries of Davis’s band every night onstage. The instrument had been used in early jazz by Sidney Bechet but had largely disappeared from modern jazz. Coltrane had barely touched one before. Miles simply handed it to him and told him to experiment. The brighter, lighter tone opened doors Coltrane had been trying to build. On soprano, the melody of "My Favorite Things" became something else — hypnotic, Eastern, a whirling dervish of a thing. Repetition became momentum. Sustained notes and patterns created an intensity rooted in rhythm and color rather than rapid harmonic shifts. Porter writes that Coltrane was under no label pressure to record this tune. He chose it freely. He later called it his favorite of all his own recordings.

The song tracked alongside Coltrane through every stage of his evolution. The crisp 1960 studio version became a 20-minute piece by 1963 at the Newport Jazz Festival, a 30-minute exploration by 1965, and a 57-minute marathon in Tokyo in 1966. You can chart his entire stylistic shift from modal post-bop to raw spiritual free jazz just by listening to how he treats this one song over six years. Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead later recalled urging his bandmates to study how Coltrane’s quartet took simple structures and extended them far beyond their original length — a lesson that shaped the Dead’s own approach to improvisation.

Atlantic Records released an edited version as a 45 RPM single in 1961, splitting the 13-minute track across both sides at roughly 2:45 each. Radio DJs played it heavily. A Black avant-garde jazz musician playing a Broadway show tune on an obscure instrument became a genuine pop radio hit. The album sold 50,000 copies in its first year, extraordinary numbers for a jazz LP. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and certified Gold by the RIAA in 2018 — 500,000 copies sold, a milestone almost unheard of for a jazz recording.

Coltrane told Down Beat in 1960: “I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.” He took a song about raindrops and kittens and turned it into a 14-minute meditation on the nature of improvisation itself. Sixty-five years later, that meditation keeps revealing new rooms.