Coltrane’s Favorites

One of my least favorite things is listening to John Coltrane play the second section of “My Favorite Things.” Normally, that part would be described as the bridge, but Richard Rodgers’s melody is actually structured in such a way that there is no bridge — it ends right after the second melody. Coltrane doesn’t play this section until the very end, and in his interpretation, the secondary melody is a bittersweet harbinger of finality and closure; it’s a musical exit sign.Lately I’ve been listening to Coltrane (1926–67) play his signature song in four different versions on two new releases, the CD “My Favorite Things: Coltrane at Newport” (Impulse!) and the DVD “Live in ’60, ’61, & ’65” (Reelin’ in the Years). These are hardly the only new Coltrane products to hit shelves as we approach the jazz messiah’s 81st birthday this Sunday: There’s “Interplay,” a new five-disc boxed set containing all seven (and change) LPs that Coltrane recorded as a co-leader for Prestige Records. (“Interplay” is a follow-up to last year’s “Fearless Leader,” a six-disc box containing all of Coltrane’s Prestige sessions as the sole leader.)Like his longtime collaborator, Miles Davis, Coltrane’s music was in a permanent state of flux; he constantly sought to make music of extreme complexity while — sometimes at the very same time — trying to keep everything as direct and simple as possible. “My Favorite Things” satisfied both ends. When Coltrane first recorded the childish show tune in 1960, it was a bombshell on many levels, and not simply because it was the closest thing he had to a hit single. Outside of the innovative musical direction he took with the song, he essentially introduced the soprano saxophone (having been inspired to play it by Steve Lacy, the first modernist to pick up the instrument) and the jazz waltz (3/4 was almost never used in modern jazz up to that point) to most modern jazz listeners. Coltrane also pioneered his own version of the part-major, part-minor “modal” tonality with which he had experimented in his tenure with Davis but continued to refine in his own way.Even more than the successful “Giant Steps” of 1959, “My Favorite Things” dramatically introduced Coltrane, then known as a sideman of Davis and Thelonious Monk, as a bandleader. He kept playing it for the remaining eight years of his life, more than any other composition (even his own), not only because it thrilled the crowds, but because he could take it wherever he wanted, from the comparatively straightforward 1960 Atlantic recording to the screaming, almost frighteningly “free” version from his final taped concert in April 1967.The new “Newport” release contains both of Coltrane’s key appearances at the festival, in 1963 and 1965. At the former, Coltrane, who virtually never spoke between songs or introduced tunes, is so eager to segue from his opening number, “I Want To Talk About You,” into “Favorite Things,” that he starts playing directly, without taking the time to switch to the soprano, and actually plays an introductory opening vamp on tenor sax. He does the same thing on the third tune, “Impressions,” normally a tenor tune, that he starts on soprano. Importantly, the opening soprano segment of “Impressions” is being released here for the first time; the previous LP and CD editions all open about seven minutes into the performance.Coltrane plays a completely different intro in the 1965 concert. The two versions are also interesting to contrast because they show how different drummers helped shape the music. In July 1963, the quartet’s longtime percussionist, Elvin Jones, took time off to deal with his addiction problems, and was replaced temporarily by Roy Haynes. But he was back in his familiar place two years later. Although Jones was generally a further-out drummer than Mr. Haynes, the Haynes recorded version actually sounds a bit more outer-spacey than the Jones version.The new DVD is a blessed event because it contains roughly twothirds of all the known footage of Coltrane in performance. The last of three segments, a concert from Belgium from a month after Newport ’65, ends with a similarly brilliant rendition of “Favorite Things.” The version from the second segment, a show from Germany in December 1961, is especially valuable because of the presence of the brilliant multireed player Eric Dolphy, who toured as a member of Coltrane’s group that season. Just as ‘Trane switches to soprano, Dolphy takes his solo on his own secondary horn, the flute but, in contrast to some of the more extreme material (like “Chasin’ the Trane”) from the Vanguard, “Favorite Things” finds Dolphy in a positively mellow mood, much as he was on his own standout treatment of a Rodgers song, “Glad To Be Unhappy.” There are also a few bars in which the two play the theme together.The most surprising part of the new DVD is a 30-minute set filmed almost two years earlier, also in Germany, when Coltrane was still a member of the Miles Davis Quintet. Davis and Coltrane were part of a Norman Granz tour that also included Stan Getz and Oscar Peterson, and the producer worked out an arrangement deal for the three groups to be filmed by local television. Davis, however, loused up the deal by deciding not to participate, so Coltrane and the rhythm section did three numbers without him. For a finale, they were joined by Getz on a ballad medley: Coltrane plays “What’s New?” (more than two years before the “Ballads” album), and Getz plays “Moonlight in Vermont.” The payoff is Monk’s “Hackensack,” played by all three headliners — Coltrane, Getz, and Peterson. Coltrane’s admiration for Getz is well known (he once said of his younger colleague, “We’d all play like that if we could”), and to see them locking horns together, trading fours, is remarkable.On the DVD, the 1960 “Hackensack” leads directly into the 1961 “My Favorite Things.” Here Coltrane, as always, holds off playing the “B” section as long as he possibly can. In earlier versions, he plays the 16-bar “A” section three times, as Rodgers wrote it, although by 1965, he was only playing it twice. The 20-bar “B” section starts in minor as Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric details some unfavorite things (dog bites, bee stings) but resolves in major for the ending. Coltrane uses the “B” as essentially a coda, and when you hear it you know he’s winding up.In the course of the show that introduced it, “The Sound of Music,” the heroine starts as a novice nun in an abbey and progresses to being a wife and mother, but as Coltrane plays it, “My Favorite Things” travels the opposite path, moving from a show tune to a prayer, a mantra, a hymn, and the most inspirational of all songs of praise and worship.wfriedwald@nysun.com

Coltrane’s Favorites

Coltrane’s Favorites

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