My Favorite Things

My kids have been watching The Sound of Music a lot lately. I have known many of the songs since elementary school, but I somehow never got around to watching the movie until now. Apparently it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last musical, and boy did they leave it all on the stage. I was sitting there going, “Oh snap, that song is from this movie too?” It probably supplied half the repertoire for my elementary general music class. When I sang “My Favorite Things” all those times, I thought about the words, but not much about the tune itself.

John Coltrane, on the other hand, thought very hard about the tune, and radically remade it on his famous album of the same name. The album came out only a year after The Sound of Music debuted on Broadway. I struggle to imagine how it must have sounded back then. Like, imagine if in 2017, Kendrick Lamar had released an avant-garde thirteen-minute reworking of “You’re Welcome” from Moana, maybe that would be comparable?

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Samples and community

The defining musical experience of my lifetime is hearing familiar samples in unfamiliar contexts. For me, the experience is usually a thrill. For a lot of people, the experience makes them angry. Using recognizable samples necessarily means having an emotional conversation with everyone who already has an attachment to the original recording. Music is about connecting with other people. Sampling, like its predecessors quoting and referencing, is a powerful connection method.

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