My Favourite Things

On My Favorite Things, John Coltrane quietly redrew the map of modern jazz. Released in March 1961 on Atlantic Records, the album marked Coltrane’s first recorded use of the soprano saxophone, a choice that would come to define both the record and a crucial turning point in his career. An edited version of the title track became an unlikely radio hit in 1961, carrying Coltrane’s music far beyond its usual audience and cementing the album as a major commercial success.

The story begins a year earlier, when Miles Davis bought Coltrane a soprano saxophone while touring Europe in March 1960. Long sidelined in jazz since its early champions, the instrument immediately caught Coltrane’s attention. By the time he left the Davis band and began a residency at New York’s Jazz Gallery that summer, he had assembled the first incarnation of what would become the John Coltrane Quartet. With McCoy Tyner, Steve Davis and Elvin Jones in place by autumn, sessions at Atlantic Studios shortly before Halloween captured the entirety of My Favorite Things, alongside material later used for Coltrane Plays the Blues and Coltrane’s Sound.

The album’s centrepiece is its radical reimagining of “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. Stripped of its Broadway sweetness, the melody is stretched into a modal waltz, circling hypnotically over alternating E minor and E major vamps. Coltrane and Tyner abandon conventional chord changes in favour of long, searching solos, transforming a familiar tune into something meditative and insistent. The effect proved transformative. As later noted in The World According to John Coltrane, the recording became Coltrane’s most requested piece and a bridge to wider public acceptance, without compromising the exploratory spirit of his music.

Elsewhere, Coltrane balances accessibility with complexity. His take on George Gershwin’s “But Not for Me” showcases the dense harmonic logic of his so-called Coltrane changes, familiar from Giant Steps and “Countdown”, but delivered here with a sense of poise rather than spectacle. The album as a whole feels remarkably assured, a quartet locking into a shared language just as Coltrane himself was stepping into full artistic command.

Reception has only grown warmer with time. The record has been consistently ranked among Coltrane’s finest, earning a Grammy Hall of Fame award in 1998 and achieving gold status in 2018. Coltrane himself reportedly described “My Favorite Things” as his favourite of all his recordings, a fitting epitaph for an album that managed to be both inviting and quietly revolutionary.