In October 1960 he made it the title track of his album, improvising on soprano sax on the raga scale introduced to him by sitarist Ravi Shankar. Intrigued, Coltrane put it in his set, reworking it as a minor-key vamp. McCoy Tyner, Coltrane’s then pianist, recalled that a song-plugger showed Coltrane the sheet music. The shifting cadences and final reassuring shift to a major key capture brilliantly the two women’s emotions. The now so-familiar “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens / bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens” are part of a nostalgic list that Maria summons to cheer herself up. Would-be nun Maria is told by her abbess she is to work as a governess for the von Trapp family. The song came from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway show The Sound of Music, where it was first performed in 1959 by Mary Martin and Patricia Neway. The song’s waltz tempo, unusual structure and frothy emotional palette were at odds with prevailing jazz practice. But fellow saxophonist John Coltrane’s choice of “My Favourite Things” as a 13-minute album track seemed perverse. For a while in the late 1950s and early 1960s New York jazz musicians competed to turn unlikely tunes into modernist gems: Sonny Rollins, for example, transformed “I’m an Old Cowhand”.
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