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?

In his excellent biography, John Coltrane: His Life and Music, Lewis Porter points out that Coltrane was under no label pressure to record “My Favorite Things,” and nor did he think the tune 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, at least by the modest commercial standards of jazz.

“My Favorite Things” must have had profound meaning for Coltrane, since he performed it constantly for the rest of his life. As a result, there are tons of live recordings in circulation. Here’s a good one from 1965, with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, the same pianist and drummer who played on the album version.

Coltrane’s performances of the tune got steadily longer and wilder towards the end of his life. This one, recorded in Japan in 1966, is almost an hour long.

Coltrane’s solos on the studio version have been well analyzed. This transcription is a good one. (It’s transposed up a whole step for saxophone players.)

There has been some useful explanation of McCoy’s piano parts too.

The best scholarly source I’ve found on McCoy’s playing is Sami Linna’s dissertation, McCoy Tyner, Modal Jazz, and the Dominant Chord. I made charts of some of the rhythm section grooves, drawing heavily on Linna’s transcriptions.

“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 groove’s main feature is the accented “and” of one, the offbeat subdivision between beats one and two. This is the weakest beat in the bar, and thus the least likely one to be accented, so it’s very strange to hear Coltrane’s band accenting it constantly. The band is using a wide swing, so the first offbeat is displaced much closer to beat two than it is to beat one. I did the math, and the accent falls about two ninths of the way through the bar. This goes beyond syncopation to severe rhythmic 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 thirteen minutes, 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.

Here’s a Groove Pizza representation of McCoy Tyner’s piano riffs. The kick drum (the outer rectangle) shows the main left hand rhythm, while the snare drum (the inner rectangle) shows the main right hand rhythm.

Here are some representative Elvin Jones drum patterns.

The tune’s rhythmic dissonance and tension are a sharp contrast to its extreme harmonic predictability. The bassist Steve Davis drones his open E string for nearly the entire thirteen minutes. People often point to this tune as evidence of Coltrane’s admiration for Ravi Shankar. Coltrane did indeed revere Shankar, so much so that he named his second son Ravi, but he didn’t start listening to Indian music until a couple of years after “My Favorite Things” was recorded. Coltrane just loved a good pedal point, and he was interested in the fact that drones and pedals are common features of many world musical cultures.

“My Favorite Things” is not structured at all like a typical jazz performance. The usual jazz form is head-solos-head: the band plays the written melody (the head), then they take turns improvising new melodies over the head’s chord progression (the solos), and finally, they play the written melody again (the head out.) This is not what happens in “My Favorite Things.” Instead, the sections of the head are interspersed among a series of harmonically static and formally open-ended solo sections. Both Sami Linna and Lewis Porter refer to these solo sections as vamps, because they’re short loops that repeat for as long as the soloist feels like it. However, I don’t like this term. 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” aren’t just passing the time; they are the main musical attraction, the arrangement’s reason for being. For that reason, I prefer to call them grooves rather than vamps.

Here’s my annotated listening guide:

Intro (0:00)

The opening riff is an enigmatic series of fourths and seconds that neatly encodes the whole harmonic universe of the tune in just four bars. Here’s how it looks in circularized MIDI form. The outer ring is the piano right hand, the next ring in is the piano left hand, and then the inner two rings are the bass and drums.

Minor groove (0:08)

Labeled “Minor Groove 1” in my chart. The chords here are peculiar. McCoy’s first chord is an Em11. You could also think of it 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 much like the blues, but blues is never far from the surface in Coltrane’s and Tyner’s music.

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.

Minor groove (0:35)

The same Em11 to F#m11 chords as before, but in a different rhythm. Labeled “Minor Groove 2” in my chart.

Head – A section (0:43)

“Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels.” Same as the first A section.

Major groove (1:01)

Surprise! A burst of sunshine. The chords are Emaj7 and F#m11 (which now fits into the key perfectly.) Labeled “Major Groove 1” in my chart.

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.

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 Minor 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)

Includes the part labeled “Major Groove 2” in my chart. 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 Minor Groove 2 in different voicings, with a more intense and insistent drive, then returns to Minor 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, that he doesn’t just want to play showtunes with cooler chord changes, that 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)

This is labeled “Ending Groove” in my chart, unsurprisingly. Linna writes these chords 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. Much like the tune itself.

“My Favorite Things” was my first entry point into Coltrane’s music, as is probably the case for a lot of listeners. It’s a strange introduction. You hear about this legendary jazz musician who both felt and inspired intense spiritual devotion, and yet his most famous recording is a silly showtune. But then you listen more, and it begins to make sense. Coltrane recorded lots of pop songs like this, without any apparent irony or condescension. He also recorded many more waltzes, both from musicals (“Out of This World“, “Chim Chim Cheree“) and from folkloric sources (“Spiritual“, “Greensleeves“). In his hands, this music all sounds like it comes from the same place, from an ancient and devout religiosity. Coltrane’s ability to listen below the musical surface and beyond obvious cultural associations to see the bigger connections is a constant source of inspiration for me.

Update: Vinnie Sperrazza has some thoughts.

Attention must be paid to Elvin Jones. In 1960, Jones was 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.

Throughout, Tyner’s and Jones’ relative restraint is astonishing, and key to the success of “My Favorite Things”. They didn’t play like this on any other tracks they recorded with Trane in late October 1960! Though I can’t imagine them talking about it, it must have been an intentional choice on Elvin’s and McCoy’s part to play as they do on this song.

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.

Beautifully said.