Some songs—Dylan’s most obviously—have a special quality of loyalty: except on very rare occasions—as when Hendrix covered “All Along the Watchtower” or Keith Jarrett “My Back Pages”—they come fully alive only when they are played by their composer. Others drift from performer to performer, happily, promiscuously. Sometimes, though, a song can end up being so firmly identified with a particular performer that it changes hands, becomes his, not the composer’s. This can take time: Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” is gradually becoming a Charlie Haden song… but “My Favorite Things,” well, that’s been a Coltrane song for over thirty years.
There is a long history of American musicians finding jazz in unpromising sources—as Sonny Rollins did with his swinging-in-the-saddle version of “Wagon Wheels”—but few pieces have traveled as far from their origins as the dainty little tune “My Favorite Things.”
It was originally manufactured by the indomitable songwriting factory of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein (lyrics) as part of their 1959 stage musical. This ignorable piece of harmless entertainment then went on to blight the lives of children the world over when, in 1965, it was made into a multi-Oscar-winning film starring Julie Andrews as Maria, the nun-to-be who finds love and happiness as a governess in the strict household of Baron von Trapp (Christopher Plummer). Now, the musical, as we all know, is the most worthless filmic form imaginable, and of all the irritating moments from this inherently repulsive genre none is more nauseating than when Julie Andrews, reassuring the Trapp children in the midst of a thunderstorm, bursts into a list of her favorite things: “bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with strings, these are a few…”
Coltrane was drawn to these catchy tunes. He recorded “Greensleeves” and “Chim Chim Cheree” from Mary Poppins, but neither of these captivated him or his listeners like “My Favorite Things.” He first recorded it within months of establishing his own regular band, on October 21, 1960— before the film was made. Three-quarters of what would become the greatest quartet in jazz history are present on this recording. Jimmy Garrison soon replaced Steve Davis on bass, but the core sound—of Trane plus Elvin Jones on drums and McCoy Tyner on piano—is already there.
Trane never tired of playing “My Favorite Things”; it became almost his signature tune. The last recording I have was made in Japan on July 22, 1966, a year before his death. In between there are over a dozen recorded performances. In this one song, then, we can hear in microcosm the relentless journey of search, discovery, and further searching that characterized Coltrane’s most creative period.
Trane had made his name as a tenor player, but “My Favorite Things” was one of the first recordings on which he played soprano. From the start his soprano playing had an Eastern feel and this became even more pronounced—to the disgust of Philip Larkin, who disparaged his “cobra-coaxing cacophony”—on later recordings.
Certain characteristics that run through all subsequent recordings are there on the first one: the pretty melody gradually breaking up into squalls and coils of sound, strangled cries and piercing morse that summon back the melody. But compared with later versions, it actually lopes along pretty gently. Elvin sets up a relaxed, swinging beat; relative to its full, propulsive power, McCoy’s pounding left hand sounds almost restrained here ( My Favorite Things, Atlantic 1961).
Although Trane’s quartet was a fairly stable unit, there were several changes and additions in personnel over the years. In the performance recorded in Stockholm on November 23, 1961, the quartet—with Reggie Workman substituting for Garrison—is augmented by Eric Dolphy on flute ( Coltranology, Vol. 1, Affinity 1978). At the Newport Festival in July 1963 Roy Haynes sat in for Elvin (who was undergoing mandatory rehab following drug problems). The quartet sound came to be increasingly dominated by ferocious battles between Elvin and Trane; with Haynes behind the traps we hear Trane in a more spacious setting. I can’t improve on Francis Davis’s distinction in the liner notes when he says that Haynes, for all his intensity, doesn’t “ surround Coltrane with rhythm” as Jones did ( Newport ’63, Impulse 1993).
The more Coltrane played “My Favorite Things” the further it moved from its origins. The increasing familiarity of the refrain enabled him to allude to it more and more briefly and obliquely. It also got longer and longer. At Antibes on July 27, 1965, we hear the classic quartet—Trane, Tyner, Garrison, Jones—at the peak of their form, responding instantaneously to each other’s every move, enhancing the lyricism of the tune by the ferocity of their attack on it ( Live in Antibes, INA 1988).
By the autumn of 1965 Coltrane had pushed the quartet form to the limit. Although he had often embellished his music with extra musicians, he now used younger “free” players—like Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders—to create a fundamentally different sound. In the increasing musical density—for a while he used two drummers, Elvin and Rashied Ali—Tyner was having trouble making himself heard, but it was actually Elvin who left first, in December 1965. Tyner himself quit three months later.
When Trane appears at the Village Vanguard in May 1966 it is with the band that will mark his final phase: wife Alice on piano, Pharoah, Rashied Ali on drums (“he ain’t playin’ shit,” was Elvin’s comment), and Garrison, the only member of the quartet to stay with Trane till the end. The wonderful, turbulent assault on “My Favorite Things” ( Live at the Village Vanguard Again! Impulse 1966) begins with a long solo by the bassist. By July, in Tokyo ( Live in Japan, Impulse 1991), the whole piece has extended itself to an hour with Garrison’s bass intro alone lasting fifteen minutes.
Asked why he tended to use white bassists (like Haden), Ornette Coleman said that “black people haven’t taken the string instrument as a part of their high ethnic expression”; strings, in other words, were too securely attached to the white European tradition. In outchambering, outreciting anybody who ever picked up the bass in a classical setting, then, Garrison’s solo represents a discreetly important moment in the ascendancy of black music. Since then even the cello, in the hands of players like Abdul Wadud, has been able to play its part in the business of serious black music.
In Tokyo, when the band enters after Garrison’s solo, Trane is playing alto, an instrument he’d never played in his own bands. Yamaha had given one to both Trane and Pharoah when they arrived in the country and he thought he’d try it out. Within moments we realize it’s a completely new sound: Trane’s never sounded like this, nor has the alto. He wails and calls and cries for five minutes before we recognize the melody and he’s off again, this time taking us even further out before swerving briefly back to the theme. Now he is flying. With Alice playing star-splash piano and Rashied on shimmering, stellar drums, he’s free of what Steve called the “gravitational tug” of Elvin and McCoy. They drove Coltrane; Alice and Rashied beckon. It’s pretty and then dangerous as he reaches so high the sky blues into the darkness of space before reentering, everything burning up around him. Despite its extended length, it’s a masterpiece of economy, this solo: a whole career on alto compressed into just eleven minutes.
The baton changes are the moments of greatest intensity in a relay race. It’s the same in jazz. When Trane ends his solo and Pharoah, twenty-six at the time, takes the stand, you sense him handing over the torch. Pharoah, after flaring full of grace for a couple of minutes, doesn’t know what to do with it, loses his way—by which I mean that I don’t know what he’s doing with it, I lose my way. It’s the same either way: Pharoah and the listener share the same dilemma.
You see, Trane was driving forward so relentlessly that his solos start from the point where, a few months previously, they would have come to a shrieking climax. The pace of his development was such that by late 1965 he was unsure where to go next. When the other band members failed to show up on time at the Newport Festival in February 1966, he went onstage with Thelonious Monk and his group. After the set the promoter expressed his relief that the band hadn’t showed up and Trane confided that he sometimes doubted if he was going in the right direction. Elvin had been in no doubt: all he could hear in his last months with Trane “was a lot of noise.” Certainly stretches of the last phase seem almost unlistenable-to. In this context “My Favorite Things” is like a familiar path through the sometimes impenetrable jungle of this final phase. We cherish an ameliorative hope that an artist’s last works will be his best, but some of Coltrane’s—like the duets with Rashied Ali from February 1967, released posthumously as Inter-Stellar Space—are frenzied, despairing testaments to the musical impasse to which he eventually drove himself.
Pharoah’s problem that night in Japan, then, is the one that jazz has been grappling with ever since this heyday of the avant-garde: if you start with a scream, where do you go from there? Let’s put it more simply: what is there left after Trane? In a sense Pharoah’s subsequent career has been dedicated to answering that question, to bearing the torch.
After Pharoah there’s an inconclusive duet between Rashied and Alice, lengthy enough to leave us wondering if, deep down, we don’t wish it were still Elvin and McCoy there instead. Then it’s Trane again, this time on soprano. He seems to be trying to put into this one solo everything he’s ever done and ever will do—and he’s doing it. I begin to think yes, maybe it’s his greatest performance ever (this incessant ranking and judging: the critic groping for criteria of rapture) because—the idea is almost mind-blowing—along with everything else he is swinging harder than ever.
And perhaps he even answers the question of what will come after him. Traditionally musicians built up their solos by moving from a theme or melody outward. Coltrane’s last recordings turn this inside out: he works his way toward them just as, in the quarter century since his death, jazz has worked its way back to tighter, more traditional forms. Shepp has ended up playing the blues; Pharoah’s screaming has brought him to the grandeur of what he calls his “cathedral” sound.
And the melody, as Trane plays it for the last time, “free through all he has given up, rejoicing in his mastery,” sounds fresher, more beautiful, more full of life than ever. The words are Rilke’s, from a poem written four months before his death:
Ah the ball that we hurled into infinite space,
doesn’t it fill our hand differently with its return:
heavier by the weight of where it has been.
Yes, but lighter too…
I sometimes wonder if there is any life left in some popular jazz tunes, like Monk’s “Round Midnight” or Trane’s “Naima.” Rather than exhaust “My Favorite Things,” though, Trane suggested the opposite: its inexhaustibility.
That’s why people still play it. Guitarist Ronny Jordan has recorded a funky acid-jazz mix; at the Jazz Café in London a few years ago, Ahmad Jamal’s trio roared through a wonderful, dancing version of the piece. One of the reasons it works so effectively in a trio setting is that there is no horn player to inevitably remind us of the power and invention of the absent master.
Most recently, it crops up, sort of, on Elvis Costello’s album Brutal Youth (WEA 1994). The song “This Is Hell” turns Rodgers and Hammerstein upside down, itemizing Costello’s least favorite things. It all comes to a head when
“My Favorite Things” are playing again and again
But it’s by Julie Andrews and not by John Coltrane.
1994