My Favorite Things - John Coltrane (1961)

I ended up with this CD because Anna, my girlfriend at the time, had a dad who was a big jazz guy and she’d adopted the disc from him. When things didn’t work out with the Anna I never returned the Coltrane CD. However, Mr. Anna may still have my first copy of Charlie Hunter’s Bing Bing Bing, so it’s kind of a fair trade.

I have gone on about Miles quite a bit in this space, and I still stand by it. But some of my favorite Miles records feature Coltrane on sax, and in general I’d argue that Coltrane’s short life had nearly as big an impact as Miles did on jazz.

Featuring McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums, This is a late 1960 session where Trane takes his band through four songbook standards (Rogers & Hammerstein, Cole Porter, and two Gershwin tunes).

People write doctoral dissertations on Coltrane’s use of scales and modes, and I couldn’t possibly add anything useful to that. But the thing that always sticks out to me is how under everything he plays. It feels like he’s exactly where he wants to be even in the middle of a minutes-long solo.

This is my favorite Trane record, even if it’s not his most famous.

note: I’ve linked into the middle of the playlist for the stereo version of the album. Click through to the full playlist to find the mono version if that’s more your thing.