As if my musical life hasn’t been stimulating enough lately, BBC Radio 4’s fine series Soul music recently broadcast a lovely programme (here) about My favorite things—one of the great jazz standards, a seemingly saccharine song whose complex harmonies have provided inspiration for musos, um, down the ages.
Coltrane’s versions are justly renowned, like this, live in 1961:
OMG, Bill Evans too:
It’s almost too perfect to be vocalised, but here’s Sarah Vaughan, changing the mood again:
Stephen Jones: a blog 
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Thanks! Sure, I have to take seriously any hero of Amy’s (https://stephenjones.blog/2017/04/26/back-to-black/), and I love the big band. Call me cerebral [You’re celebral—Ed.] but it’s the way Coltrane and Co. relish the more internal potential of the harmonies that I admire…
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I have been the proud owner of the Coltrane version for many years and have enjoyed many versions by him. He also does a cracking version of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UajVYaWDEeY
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Wow yeah! Maybe the more saccharine the original, the more it gains by being worked over?! Cf. Somewhere over the rainbow (https://stephenjones.blog/2017/06/01/homage-to-nina-hagen/).
I envy you going through all this stuff at the time. With the exceptions noted on my blog, I basically moved straight from Boulez and Tang poetry to Daoist fieldwork…
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I was lucky to grow up in the 50s influenced by a young aunt who was into pop music and movies. This was one of my first music memories:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpodXO4_-4k. I moved on to Mahler and Messiaen and Archie Shepp.
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Lucky indeed. My parents would have fainted to be exposed to such populism…
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