![]() He once explained to fellow saxophonist Wayne Shorter that part of his approach to soloing was to start in the middle of a sentence and then try to go both directions at once, but it wasn’t nearly as haphazard as that explanation sounds. By 1955 he was a member of the Miles Davis Quintet, and it is in that unit that he truly came into his own, appearing on a number of classic recordings, including “‘Round Midnight.”Ī master of both melody and rhythm, Coltrane quickly showed that he had both the imagination and the musical chops to take the saxophone into some new realms. His first recorded work came as an alto player in Dizzy Gillespie’s group in the early ’50s. In 1947 he was hired by blues/R&B jazz singer Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson to be a tenor player, which opened him up to a new range of influences, including Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. He studied music at a pair of Philadelphia schools-Granoff Studios and the Ornstein School of Music-and while there he landed a job in Jimmy Heath’s big band. His first instrument was the E-flat horn, followed by the clarinet, but by high school he had switched to alto saxophone (his main early influences were Johnny Hodges, best known for his long career with Duke Ellington, and R&B honker Tab Smith). It was produced by Nesuhi Ertegun and recorded by TEC Hall of Fame Award inductee, Tom Dowd, along with Phil Iehle.īorn in North Carolina in 1926, John Coltrane showed an early love and aptitude for music (his father played several instruments). It was a pivotal moment in Coltrane’s ascendancy to the peak of jazz’s Mount Olympus, and one of the great performances in modern American music. At 13 minutes, 41 seconds in length, his original recorded version of the song, tracked October 21, 1960, at Atlantic Studios in New York, goes places even the world-traveling Von Trapp family (who inspired The Sound of Music) never dreamed of. Recent generations probably know “My Favorite Things” from the 1965 film of The Sound of Music-can’t you picture Julie Andrews cheerily warbling the first line: “Raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens”? But to jazz-lovers everywhere, “My Favorite Things” has always belonged to the great post-war saxophone titan John Coltrane. It was sung by Mary Martin onstage and on the original cast album, which was Number One on the Billboard charts for 16 weeks in 1960, and in the Top 200 for six years. The songwriting credit belongs to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who penned the song for their immortal 1959 Broadway musical, The Sound of Music. ![]()
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