Last week I was at the International Society for Music Education conference, which is by a wide margin the biggest academic conference I have ever been to. I presented about teaching pop music theory and aural skills. While I was mentally gearing up for it, I came back to a song that I first encountered when we sang it in elementary school, “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.
Music teachers love this tune! As I was writing this, I was listening to the Texas Tech steel drum band performing, and they started playing it, in a hip 4/4 Latin arrangement. It’s everywhere!
I remember generally liking the song as a kid, but not feeling very strongly about it. I didn’t yet have the conceptual frameworks to appreciate its beautiful melody, the pairing of that melody with its syllable-heavy lyrics, or the nifty way it alternates minor and major. I definitely didn’t think much of the stiff oom-pah-pah rhythm. I forgot about the tune for several years, but then in high school I became obsessed with the Grateful Dead, and I started reading every interview I could with Jerry Garcia (not easy to do before the internet.) Jerry had great taste and talked a lot about his own musical inspirations, especially John Coltrane. So of course I had to go listen to John Coltrane. The first album I listened to was this one:
I did not get it, at all. A corny showtune being played on a soprano saxophone? For almost fourteen minutes? I associated soprano sax with Kenny G. I should probably have started with some more normal jazz; this recording turns out to be a very unconventional one, for reasons I will discuss in a minute. But Jerry said that this guy is important, so I kept listening. Eventually I did come to understand it, and then became obsessed. I ended up performed “My Favorite Things” in Coltrane’s arrangement about a thousand times with my jazz group, and have kept coming back to it regularly since then. Most recently, I edited together some of the most hypnotic grooves for my students and myself to practice improvising over.
If you are a Coltrane fan, then you already know “My Favorite Things” and why it’s important. I’m writing this post for people who are not deep into jazz, but who are curious about it, or who have heard people like me talk about Coltrane and are wondering why he’s such a big deal. To do that, let’s imagine that it’s March of 1961, and Coltrane’s My Favorite Things album has just come out. The Sound of Music has been running on Broadway for two years at this point, and it’s a big hit, but the movie won’t come out for another four years. The Broadway cast album was a major Billboard hit in 1960, though, so if you have any familiarity with “My Favorite Things”, it is probably from that.
Notice that Mary Martin sings the song even more squarely on the beat than Julie Andrews. This is not a promising basis for a jazz masterpiece. Nevertheless, when a song plugger gave Coltrane the sheet music after a gig, Coltrane was intrigued. In John Coltrane: His Life and Music, Lewis Porter says that Coltrane was under no label pressure to record this tune, and nor did he think it was in any way beneath him. To the contrary, Coltrane said that he “would love to have written it” (p. 182). He also said it was his favorite of his own recordings (p. 184). The public thought so too, because the record was a smash hit by the modest commercial standards of jazz.
Okay, fine, so Coltrane liked the tune enough to want to arrange and record it. But for almost fourteen minutes? That was an extraordinarily long performance to put on a record at the time (though Coltrane would soon start recording much longer performances.) The track isn’t just remarkable for its length, though; it’s also radical in its harmonic minimalism and open-ended structure. I struggle to imagine how it must have sounded when it first arrived. The best analogy I can think of would be if in 2017, Kendrick Lamar had released an avant-garde fourteen-minute reworking of “You’re Welcome” from Moana.
“My Favorite Things” must have had profound meaning for Coltrane, because he performed it constantly for the rest of his life. As a result, there are tons of live recordings in circulation. This one from 1963 is a scorcher. It has Roy Haynes on drums rather than Elvin Jones, which gives it a very different groove from the studio version—Roy plays with brushes!
This one from the same year has worse sound quality, but the performances are sensational.
European television did an excellent job presenting jazz in the 1960s, so you can see the Coltrane Quartet in action on Belgian (?) television in 1965.
Coltrane’s performances of the tune got steadily longer and wilder towards the end of his life. This recording from Japan in 1966 is almost an hour long.
Every recording of “My Favorite Things” is worth hearing—Coltrane never recorded a boring minute of music in his life—but the original recording is the canonical one, and rightly so. The rhythm section’s minimalism and focus contrast beautifully with Coltrane’s wildness. I’m going to walk you through the recording in detail, supported by several resources: this transcription of Coltrane’s solos by Cristinel Manascurta; and analyses of McCoy Tyner’s piano part by Thembi Dunjana and Aimee Nolte. I also draw heavily on Sami Linna’s dissertation, McCoy Tyner, Modal Jazz, and the Dominant Chord.
There are a couple of things that make this recording unconventional. One is the time signature. “My Favorite Things” is the paradigmatic jazz waltz, meaning that it’s in 3/4 time (“one two three, one two three”) rather than the vastly more common 4/4 (“one two three four, one two three four”). The other unconventional thing is the structure. The usual form of a jazz recording is head-solos-head:
- The band plays the written melody. This is the head.
- The musicians take turns improvising on the tune’s form and chord progression. These are the solos.
- The band plays the written melody again. This is the head out.
This is not what happens in “My Favorite Things.” Instead, Coltrane splits the sections of the head apart and intersperses them among a series of open-ended, harmonically static solos. Both Sami Linna and Lewis Porter refer to these solo sections as vamps, because they are short loops that repeat for as long as the soloist feels like playing them. I don’t like this term, because typically, a vamp in jazz is something you do while you wait for the “real” music to start, like looping the intro to a song while you introduce the band. The between-melody sections of “My Favorite Things” are not there to fill time; they are the main musical attraction, the arrangement’s entire reason for being. For that reason, I prefer to call them grooves rather than vamps.
Here’s my annotated listening guide:
Intro (0:00)
As the track begins, you hear McCoy Tyner playing an enigmatic riff in octaves. It’s all fourths and seconds, and it accents the “and” of one, the offbeat subdivision between beats one and two. This is the weakest eighth note in the bar, and therefore the least likely one to be accented, so it’s very strange to hear McCoy accenting it so hard.
It isn’t just that McCoy is hitting this weak subdivision, though; he is also playing it extremely late. This is a consequence of his wide swing: he is dramatically lengthening the first half of each beat and correspondingly shortening the second half of the beat. The image below shows the first two bars of the recording on an eighth note grid. The yellow markers show note onsets. If McCoy was playing straight, all the yellow markers would be on the grid lines. However, they aren’t; his offbeat eighth notes are extremely late, practically falling on the next beat.
I did the math, and the accented first offbeats fall almost exactly a quarter of the way through the bar. This implies a 4:3 polyrhythm. You could think of this kind of syncopation as a conflict, the rhythmic equivalent of dissonance. But rhythmic dissonance is like harmonic dissonance: it’s a function of context. When you hear the swung “and”-of-one accent repeated for a long time, you get used to it, and then it becomes less of a dissonance and more of a new kind of consonance. Straight waltzes start sounding wrong by comparison.
The tune’s rhythmic dissonance and tension are a contrast to its extreme harmonic predictability. Bassist Steve Davis pedals his open E string under the intro and then keeps doing it for the entire duration of the tune, functioning like a broken drone. People sometimes point to Coltrane’s love of drones as evidence of his admiration for Ravi Shankar. Coltrane did indeed revere Shankar, so much so that he named his second son Ravi. However, Coltrane hadn’t yet started listening to Indian music until a couple of years after “My Favorite Things” was recorded. He just loved pedal point, and he was interested in the fact that drones and pedals are common features of many world musical cultures.
Minor groove (0:08)
Elvin Jones settles into the drum pattern. He dances around the beat more freely than McCoy or Steve Davis, but with more restraint than usual. I isolated his drums with Ableton’s stem separation—here are the fifth and sixth bars of the tune.
Elvin is swinging much more narrowly than McCoy! His eighths are almost straight. McCoy gradually straightens out his eights over the course of the performance too.
Vinnie Sperrazza says of Elvin’s performance on this recording:
In 1960, Jones was perhaps the only drummer in jazz who could have gotten Trane’s arrangement of “My Favorite Things” off the ground. Throughout, Elvin subtly alters his volume and density, with constant micro variations on his basic time-keeping pattern. He never once plays a dramatic fill, and rarely even leaves his ride cymbal. More to the point, on “My Favorite Things”, Elvin’s storied rolling triplets are, maybe for the first time, being used to their fullest musical potential: Elvin’s burbling brook is gently inducing a trance.
The harmony in this groove seems like a cool, laconic E Dorian, but it’s peculiar when you get into it. McCoy’s first chord is an Em11, played as an E minor triad with a D major triad on top of it. This is a cool sound, because you perceive it as being both an E minor chord with a lot of extensions, and as two distinct chords. Also note that Em11 contains six of the seven notes in E Dorian mode, so it’s like hearing the entire scale at once.
The second chord in the groove is F#m11, which is Em11 slid up a whole step. F#m11 almost fits within E Dorian mode too, except for the fact that it contains G-sharp, a major third above E. You’d think that the G-sharp would clash against the minor-ness of E Dorian mode, but mixing major and minor is standard practice in the blues. “My Favorite Things” may not sound especially bluesy, but the blues is never far from the surface in Coltrane’s and Tyner’s music.
I call this piano rhythm Groove 1, and I’ll be referring back to it later.
Head – A section (0:17)
The “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens” part. See Sami Linna’s dissertation for a transcription and analysis of Coltrane’s arrangement and a comparison to the original sheet music. The first phrase of the melody is the pitches E, F-sharp and B only, which doesn’t imply E major or E minor, it just floats. This is the same pitch collection that Coltrane uses for the opening fanfare to A Love Supreme. Coincidence?
McCoy play the chords pretty much as written, with some mild embellishments. For example, the sheet music says Em for the first four bars, but McCoy adds a chromatic line implying Em to Em(maj7) to Em7 and back up. In the 13th bar, where the sheet music says C, McCoy plays F, presumably to create more motion and dissonance. The wild thing is that Steve Davis is playing his E pedal throughout all of this, and McCoy is doubling it. This makes all of the chords sound like weird, crunchy voicings of Em rather than the European-classical-sounding functional harmony of the original.
Coltrane plays much straighter than the rhythm section, but he lies behind the beat, so his offbeat eighths line up anyway. I didn’t notice this until Milton Mermikides pointed it out in his paper, “‘Straight and Late’: Analytical Perspectives on Coltrane’s Time-feel.” Coltrane’s behind-the-beat phrasing is more subtle in “My Favorite Things” than in the recordings that Mermikides talks about, but it’s apparent if you zoom in on the waveforms or listen closely.
Minor groove (0:35)
This follows the structure of the tune as written, which has a break between sections on Em. Coltrane extends the break from two bars to eight. McCoy plays the same Em11 to F#m11 chords as the first minor groove, but in a different rhythm. The first chord is three eighths notes long, the second is four eighth notes long, and the third is five eighth notes long. Hip! I will be calling this pattern Groove 2.
Head – A section (0:43)
“Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels.” Musically the same as the first A section, but Coltrane plays with the rhythmic phrasing of the melody more freely.
Major groove (1:01)
Surprise, it’s E major rather than E minor, a burst of sunshine. Here, again, Coltrane is following the structure of the original tune, but extending the break from two bars to eight. The chords are Emaj7 and F#m11, and the latter chord’s G-sharp now fits into the key perfectly. The rhythm is Groove 2.
Head – B section (1:26)
“Girls with white dresses in blue satin sashes.” Same as the A sections, except it starts on Emaj7 rather than Em, and then moves to Amaj7 rather than C.
Head – A section (1:44)
Back to the minor-feeling “raindrops on roses” part.
Minor groove (2:01)
Coltrane trills B and C-natural, which clashes excitingly against the E Dorian background.
Head – A section (2:18)
McCoy plays the “raindrops on roses” part, with tighter rhythmic organization than Coltrane uses.
Minor groove (2:35)
McCoy plays Groove 1 in different voicings. This is remarkable playing for a jazz tune. It’s ostensibly a solo section, but McCoy is playing more of a background figure. By putting this groove in the forefront, he’s insisting that you give it your complete attention.
Head – A section (3:08)
McCoy plays “cream-colored ponies.”
Major groove (3:25)
This is McCoy’s longest solo section, yet he’s still playing groove units repeated in groups of four or eight. Even his single-note lines are organized into repeating figures. This solo is structured more like a James Brown groove than like bebop.
Head – B section (5:56)
McCoy plays “girls in white dresses” in an abstracted chords-only way.
Minor groove (6:12)
McCoy plays Groove 2 in different voicings, with a more intense and insistent drive, then returns to Groove 1. The tension of all this repetition is getting to be almost unbearable, but McCoy doesn’t release it, he just banks it by playing quieter.
Head – A section (6:45)
McCoy plays “raindrops on roses” yet again, not as aggressively, but with the same level of conviction.
Minor groove (7:01)
Coltrane re-enters, repeating his tense, Dorian-mode-defying trills of B and C natural.
Head – A section (7:10)
Coltrane plays “raindrops on roses.”
Minor groove (7:26)
Coltrane’s first long solo section. This is where the really ecstatic, transportive playing begins, as he alternates long chord tones and simple pentatonics with wild and fast chromatic and atonal runs. Coltrane hadn’t been playing soprano sax for very long when this was recorded, and he couldn’t completely control his intonation yet. But that doesn’t detract from his playing; when his tuning wavers, it adds to the feeling of searching and yearning.
Head – A section (9:43)
Coltrane plays “cream-colored ponies.” That’s your eighth time hearing this melody so far!
Major groove (9:59)
Coltrane’s second long solo section, even more ecstatic and transportive than the first. By 12:00, he’s off the rhythmic grid completely, alternating rapidly between a B/C-sharp trill up high and a major seventh arpeggio down below, like two people playing at once. (And yet, this is all pretty tame compared to how Coltrane would be playing a few years later.) This whole time, McCoy and Steve Davis have been locked into their same steady groove pattern. Elvin Jones is playing a little more freely, but even he is more stable and restrained than usual. The contrast between the locked-in rhythm section and Coltrane’s exploratory flights is extraordinary.
Head – B section (12:16)
Coltrane plays “girls in white dresses.” Notice that throughout the tune, the first four bars of each melody section have the same chords as the groove preceding it, so there isn’t a clear demarcation between groove and melody. Coltrane is trying to tell you something here: he doesn’t just want to play showtunes with cooler chord changes; he wants to connect jazz to larger and older musical traditions than those of Western Europe. He wants to evoke the traditional musics of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and to make music as a devotional practice, not just as art for art’s sake. Coltrane would make all those ideas explicit in his subsequent albums, but they are already implicit here.
Head – C section (12:33)
At last, after twelve and a half minutes, we finally hear “When the dog bites, when the bee stings.” It’s the first genuinely contrasting part of written melody that you’ve heard this entire time. It starts off sadder than the other sections, but Julie Andrews ends it upbeat, in the relative major. Coltrane ends downbeat, returning to E minor at the end. And it isn’t the cool ambiguity of E Dorian/blues, either, but rather, the genuine darkness of E natural minor.
Ending groove (12:49)
Linna writes the chords here as Gmaj9/E and Cmaj7/E. As with the Dorian-ish chords from earlier, you can hear these both as highbrow voicings of Em and as distinct chords in their own right, rich with bigger possibilities.
What does it mean?
Coltrane recorded lots of pop songs like “My Favorite Things”, without any apparent irony or condescension. He had a remarkable ability to transform a lightweight frivolity like “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” into a transcendent work of art. He also recorded lots of waltzes, from musical theater (“Out of This World”, “Chim Chim Cheree”) and from folkloric sources (“Spiritual”, “Greensleeves”). In Coltrane’s hands, this music all sounds like it comes from the same place, from an ancient and devout religiosity. His ability to listen below the musical surface and the immediate cultural associations of a tune to see the bigger connections is a constant source of inspiration for me.
But so like I said, while Coltrane is never boring, “My Favorite Things” connects far outside his usual listenership, and not just because it’s a familiar tune. Why? Vinnie Sperrazza has some ideas.
As McCoy and Elvin churn, drawing our attention to tiny changes in the rhythm, major and minor tonality are no longer opposed, nor ranked in a hierarchy, but simply alternate and coexist. With the trance-inducing rhythms of McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, “My Favorite Things” doesn’t need to move forward in time, it doesn’t use melody and harmony to create forward motion.
Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” implies the minimalism of Steve Reich (a committed Coltrane fan, also a keen observer of Kenny Clarke!) and Phillip Glass; suggests myriad musical traditions outside the USA; connects jazz to the coming rock and psychedelic soul movements; it looks ahead to ambient music. Going backward, it’s merely the latest in a long line of Broadway tunes given new life by jazz musicians, a practice going back to Louis Armstrong.
Coltrane’s music is deeply serious, freighted with the spiritual and musical progress he undertook as the work of his life. But if John Coltrane’s music was only as “serious” as I sometimes took it to be, it would not (and could not) have touched so many people over such a distance of time and place. Coltrane, Tyner, and Jones’ music communicates, with great intensity, all their favorite things, all the beauty and joy sitting next to the pain and sorrow.
John Seery argues that “My Favorite Things” is not just an important aesthetic statement, it’s a political statement too. His article, ““My Favorite Things” as Civil Disobedience: A Mingling Descant on Creativity and Contumacy” puts its thesis in the title, though I had to look up “contumacy”—it means stubborn resistance to authority. Seery quotes Coltrane as saying that jazz musicians’ creative urge emerges out of conditions of hostility, with “everything to fear and damn few to trust.” Creative innovators are “the rejects, outcasts, sub-citizens, etc. of the very societies to which they bring so much sustenance.” Coltrane’s free jazz from the end of his life sounds unquestionably revolutionary, but Seery hears a more subtle form of protest in “My Favorite Things” too.
The recorded version was neither an act of outright anarchism nor a revolutionary manifesto vis-à-vis the world of Broadway show tunes; nor was it simply a black man dancing entertainingly to some white lyrics and ditties. It was—I think we can better see and hear in retrospect—a sly cry and critique and even uprising, albeit couched in the ostensibly upright terms of 1950ish white civility. Listening to a black man wailing ruefully in a minor key about white pleasures in 1960 should have been more discernible, as irony (or call it postcolonial jujitsu), than it was taken to be.
Aside from “My Favorite Things”, the other best-known Coltrane work by people outside of jazz fandom is A Love Supreme. It’s a more personal and revolutionary work than any arrangement of a musical theater standard could be, but it is also a more difficult entry point. I have met some people who find ALS stressful and overwhelming. “My Favorite Things” is long and intense, but highly accessible. It was an open door that I was willing to step through as a teenager and once I was in, there was no leaving.