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The Indefinite Version (of My Favorite Things)

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Beauty has nothing to do with it, but it is!
—Amiri Baraka
'How 'gainst this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?'
W. Shakespeare

In connection to the newly released album The John Coltrane Quartet plays The Sound Of Music (Impulse!), this article describes the evolution of the song "My Favorite Things" up until the last entry in the "Olatunji Concert" of 1967, where Coltrane gives a performance that is today evident to stand the test of time much further than it already has.

My initial quote applies to the resistance and critic John Coltrane had to battle in his artistic life, a fact that could come hard to understand in the light of the general acceptance now present. The mass opinion in his day was split, to say the least. In the long run, however, quality shows and prevails.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's song in the musical The Sound of Music, following its initial appearance on Broadway and on film, in as short a time as eight years was to be taken to a journey that the composers could not have anticipated when they wrote it. From the original version sung by Mary Martin on stage in 1959 Coltrane, when forming his classic quartet in 1960, picked it up to become his own "favorite thing." With his first album, also called My Favorite Things, with the "classic" quartet that was to become an all time high in modern jazz, Coltrane took a modal approach to the song. He arranged it in a chant-like, Afro-Indian, style, using his then new instrument, the soprano sax, with pianist McCoy Tyner hammering the cords to create a completely new thing in jazz. The song made Coltrane and the band to instantly sky-rocket to fame in the overall jazz scene.

From then on Coltrane kept playing it on almost every live appearance and recorded it several times up until 1965, when he made up his mind to venture into new territory, 'free form' jazz.

Having been aboard the Coltrain since almost 50 years (1958), some sunny days I flatter myself as being an authority on his music. In this text I thought I might restrain myself only to comment on a few peculiarities in the Coltrane way of treating jazz that has a bearing on the various critical viewpoints he was (and still is, by a diminishing crowd) exposed to and on the subject of this article. In the early days of his slow rise to importance, in the Miles and Monk bands, the opinion was split between devote admirers and critics thinking he was playing ugly and out of tune, didn't swing and generally was a poor musician. Coltrane himself commented that his playing 'sometimes didn't come off the way I (he) wanted it to.' This was a typically modest was of saying: please wait, you'll catch up! And although in those early days he did make some technical mistakes, because what he was after was so advanced, much of the critic was due to misunderstanding. Despite his rapid evolution, one line in his playing all to the end was a method of consciously playing with tempo. Already then he deliberately tried playing off-beat, which he did more and more regularly. This was an early element on his road to 'free form' jazz that he kept doing increasingly ever after. Close study of his solos will reveal how more and more controlled this playing became, and how he used it to expand and vitalize the scope of his music. Ugly or beautiful is a matter of taste, I go for the same opinion as Amiri Baraka's, 'Beauty has nothing to do with it, but it is!'

Incidentally, Coltrane, it appears, sometimes had a kind of love for moody tunes that has got change of key in them. Cole Porter's "Everytime We Say Goodbye" is another such example that he liked playing initially with his quartet. Although lyricwise certainly not moody, My Favorite Things in 1960 Coltrane-style gives the same kind of blue mood feeling. By the way, to change the train to yet another side track, did you ever notice the similarities between 'Everytime We say Goodbye' and Coltrane's own 'Dear Lord,' recorded 1965, years after he had stopped playing the former tune? I don't know if it was a deliberate transcription of the Porter song, or if he consciously or unconsciously drew from it. Play them after each other and you'll get it; kindred spirits, to say the least.

At present time, regrettably, all we have to judge from is recordings, the sound of his horn has since long faded. But it is evident that Coltrane, starting from the recording of 1960, stretched his initial layout of "My Favorite Things" over time to keep up with the ongoing evolution of his music. By 1965 the song did not sound the way it did in 1960, even though he kept it generally pretty strict within the original concept only adding longer, more complex solos. Or, which isn't a surprise in retrospect, it mutated naturally with the mutation of the music of the quartet.

During his artistic life Coltrane, just like a butterfly, transformed in basically four stages: From a WWII Army band member and then a pretty ordinary big band member whose performances didn't reveal a potential for what he was to become. Then came the 2nd stage, 'Pre-1960,' playing as a side man in other smaller groups and occasionally with a band under his own leadership. The glory of John Coltrane is that his music attracts jazz fans of so many different tastes. The "Pre-1960" Coltrane, still roaming within basically hard bop and although he had not yet reached his summit, because of his genius appeals to almost any bop fan, and the numbers are increasing.

The third Coltrane transformation stage, the "Classic Quartet" years 1960 to 1965, was built mostly on modal jazz that by the way, according to Miles Davis in his autobiography Miles, was invented and introduced to Coltrane by himself at the end of their playing together (People with less self esteem might have put it differently). However, to me, even though the quartet evolved so fantastically and introduced a new and superior sound in jazz during its existence, it was still at the end operating within the same framework as when formed, i.e. modal music built on harmonic structures, sometimes even blending in some bop style. Some people wrongly sometimes even regard this period as free form jazz, which it isn't, and are probably mixing up the intensity that frequently is outrageous for this latter style.

As a matter fact, again in my view, still after transforming into his last form, the so called "after-1965, free form" or "late period," Coltrane never completely left harmonic playing in his solos. The free form music then presented was for sure without harmonies, melody, beat, whatever, in its superstructure; the setting of band members, choice of songs and venues played. Undoubtedly, Coltrane really wanted to cast his imaginary ties to the past and to venture into the new musical stage of "free form" and to me this elaborate step, which included an almost opposed and impossible somersault in his way of performing his art, because of its severity was only just begun at the time of his death.

Imagine, with parallels to paining, Jeff Koons starting seriously to go into the impressionistic style or Picasso to work in the "Ink-spot" style- this was the kind of enterprise Coltrane decided for in his late music. He chose band members, to whom the basics in this new style was natural, to help him. Pharaoh Sanders and Rashied Ali most notably. He tried to change his choice of songs and arrangements (if this could be done in free form music, a better word maybe is performance planning) but in my view he never got so far as to completely free himself of the harmonic 'ties' in his soloing.

This is, however, where "My Favorite Things" comes back in focus. The songs played by free form Coltrane with almost no exception but one was non-harmonic songs and non-standards. But on his very last taped concert performance, as the very last song, appears "My Favorite Things." And it is the definitive version, over all, including those by other performers, of the Rodgers-Hammerstein composition. This time Coltrane appears, as if he knew it would be his last opportunity, to want to hand it over to future generations in its true and refined form. He solos more densly throughout than ever before. He comes as near true free form music as he ever did. He does not have to, or want, to state the melody (other than fragmentary) because it is so well known, but only to mold the song into a testament by giving it his "no-frills" vision at present state of bare-to-the-bones timeless artwork. Included are all past and furious instrument practices, all experience collected from the four development shapes, all determination, all of his genius.

By virtue of time elapsed, after 40 years when it comes to art although a short period, assessing the true merits of the Olatunji-My Favorite Things performance is a pretty sure thing. Proclaiming a work of art of indefinite value not only implies the work itself as having an artistic strength surpassing time, but also that the artist, by virtue of his creative genius, is alive to audiences long after his death.

Or, as W. Somerset Maugham has put it: "Reverence is often no more than the conventional homage we pay to things in which we are not willing to take an active interest. The best homage we can pay to the great figures of the past, Dante, Titian, Shakespeare, Spinoza, is to treat them not with reverence, but with the familiarity we should exercise if they were our contemporaries. Thus we pay the highest compliment we can, our familiarity acknowledges that they are alive for us."

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