So why is John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
John Coltrane’s music was my gateway into exploring and then falling in love with jazz, and My Favorite Things is the album that best represents that journey for me.
And even during the course of compiling and writing the best 1,000 albums ever, I think it’s fair to say I’ve gone through an evolution as a jazz fan.
It’s no wonder, when I consider the thousands of albums I listened to, revisited, sampled, and plowed through during the lengthy research process for doing something so ludicrously audacious as trying to come up with a “top 1,000 list” of anything, I suppose.
Which is another way of saying I’m not as much in a John Coltrane “jazz phase” at the moment as I have been at other times in my life (also see, by the way: the tremendous Giant Steps, #502).
But as I mention above, My Favorite Things is the album that first truly blew my mind about what was possible with jazz music. Very important thing to keep in mind here: I grew up as a “rock guy,” and “classic rock guy” was a label that I would wore as a badge of honor during some of my most critical and formative years.
Jazz came later for me as a love, and it’s still a more challenging musical form for me in many respects versus others, both in terms of how I think about it and in terms of articulating why I love it.
But I do love it. As I love and even revere Coltrane’s achievements.
At only four tracks that run just over forty minutes, it’s the nearly 14-minute title track and album opener, “My Favorite Things,” that’s the one that helped draw me into an entirely new side of the musical spectrum.
“My Favorite Things” is a “cover version” of sorts of the original, a song that became a standard from the 1959 musical, The Sound of Music, by Rodgers and Hammerstein. So there’s something immediately familiar and alluring in hearing that core melody, which leads into an astonishing journey – I’ll use that word again – that critically (for me) never strays too far away from the original line so that I never get lost in the jazz wilderness.
It’s that play against structured form and improvisation – coupled with Coltrane’s clear mastery of the saxophone (along with McCoy Tyner on piano, Steve Davis on double bass, and Elvin Jones on drums) – that all conspires to win my heart forevermore.
And here’s a really fun, swinging Dave Brubeck Quartet version of “My Favorite Things,” just for kicks.
Interestingly, the other three My Favorite Things tracks also pull from the works of iconic songwriters, with “Every Time We Say Goodbye” credited to Cole Porter, and both “Summertime” (Ira Gerswin, DuBose Heyward, George Gershwin) and “But Not for Me” (Ira and George Gershwin) credited to a Gershwin.
Of these, I’m most partial to the glorious, bright, and jumping bop of “Summertime,” which comes in as the second longest track at over eleven and a half minutes.
Some stats & info about John Coltrane – My Favorite Things
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Jazz, Instrumental, Bop
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was My Favorite Things released? 1961
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #201 out of 1,000
John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.