#My favourite things pdf movie#

The bassist Steve Davis drones his open E string for nearly the entire thirteen minutes. The tune’s rhythmic dissonance and tension are a sharp contrast to its extreme harmonic predictability. Here are some representative Elvin Jones drum patterns. The kick drum (the outer rectangle) shows the main left hand rhythm, while the snare drum (the inner rectangle) shows the main right hand rhythm. Here’s a Groove Pizza representation of McCoy Tyner’s piano riffs. Straight waltzes start sounding wrong by comparison. When you hear the swung “and”-of-one accent repeated for thirteen minutes, you get used to it, and then it becomes a less of a dissonance and more of a new kind of consonance. But rhythmic dissonance is like harmonic dissonance: it’s a function of context. This goes beyond syncopation to severe rhythmic dissonance. I did the math, and the accent falls about two ninths of the way through the bar. The band is using a wide swing, so the first offbeat is displaced much closer to beat two than it is to beat one. This is the weakest beat in the bar, and thus the one least likely one to be accented, so it’s very strange to hear Coltrane’s band accenting it constantly. The groove’s main feature is the accented “and” of one, the offbeat subdivision between beats one and two. “My Favorite Things” is the paradigmatic jazz waltz, meaning that it’s in 3/4 time (“one two three, one two three”) rather than the vastly more common 4/4 (“one two three four, one two three four”). I made charts of some of the rhythm section grooves, drawing heavily Linna’s transcriptions.

The best scholarly source I’ve found on McCoy’s playing is Sami Linna’s dissertation, McCoy Tyner, Modal Jazz, and the Dominant Chord. There has been some useful explanation of McCoy’s piano parts too. (It’s transposed up a whole step for saxophone players.)

This one, recorded in Japan in 1966, is almost an hour long.Ĭoltrane’s solos on the studio version have been well analyzed. Here’s a good one from 1965, with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, the same pianist and drummer who played on the album version.Ĭoltrane’s performances of the tune got steadily longer and wilder towards the end of his life. As a result, there are tons of live recordings in circulation. “My Favorite Things” must have had profound meaning for Coltrane, since he performed it constantly for the rest of his life. The public thought so too, because the record was a smash hit, at least by the modest commercial standards of jazz. He also said it was his favorite of his own recordings (p. To the contrary, Coltrane said that he “would love to have written it” (p. In his excellent biography, John Coltrane: His Life and Music, Lewis Porter points out that Coltrane was under no label pressure to record “My Favorite Things,” and nor did he think the tune was in any way beneath him. Like, imagine if in 2017, Kendrick Lamar had released an avant-garde thirteen-minute reworking of “ You’re Welcome” from Moana, maybe that would be comparable? I struggle to imagine how it must have sounded back then.

The album came out only a year after The Sound of Music debuted on Broadway. John Coltrane, on the other hand, thought very hard about the tune, and radically remade it on his famous album of the same name. When I sang “My Favorite Things” all those times, I thought about the words, but not much about the tune itself.

#My favourite things pdf movie#

I was sitting there going, “Oh snap, that song is from this movie too?” It probably supplied half the repertoire for my elementary general music class. Apparently it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last musical, and boy did they leave it all on the stage. I have known many of the songs since elementary school, but I somehow never got around to watching the movie until now. My kids have been watching The Sound of Musica lot lately.