Coltrane had been playing the soprano in public since the beginning of the Jazz Gallery stand; he had even performed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” on it that summer. But he’d never recorded with the instrument before October 21, 1960, the day he, Tyner, Davis, and Jonas turned The Sound of Music’s perky song of uplift into a jazz classic.
As written by Richard Rodgers, the melody is a waltz. And while Coltrane refers to his version as a waltz, his rendering quickens the tempo considerably, changing it from ¾ time to 6/8. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s original version is written in AAAB form, the A sections contrasting the great lyricist’s sparkling sensuous evocations of the good things—kittens’ whiskers, bright copper kettles, “wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings”—with the bad, spelled out in the B section: dog bites, bee stings, sadness.
It's Coltrane’s genius—inspired by Miles’s impulse to radically simplify the chord structure of his tunes—to base nearly the entirety of his thirteen-minute forty-six-second version of “My Favorite Things” on the two harmonies of the A section: harmonies that, Coltrane later said, “we’ve stretched . . . through the whole piece.” In his version, the B section is given precisely eleven seconds in the entire song, played just second before the track winds up. His improvisation through the A sections is as audacious as any he has recorded to date: at times his lightning runs up and down the E-minor scale, set against the dronelike effect of Tyner and Davis’s pedal point, resemble the Indian ragas played by the great Ravi Shankar that Coltrane was studying at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment