M A T T D O N O V A N Things in the Form o f a Prayer in the Form o f a Wail H e r e ’s t h e j o u r n e y i n m i n i a t u r e .Oscar Hammerstein, not long before stomach cancer kills him, writes the song as a duet between Marie and the Mother Abbess, for a scene in which the plucky nun is told she’s being booted from the con­ vent since she privileges melody over God. Marie doesn’t want to serve as governess for the Von Trapp clan, but she’s already shown her hand by giving rapturous voice to a song that summons the bliss and solace o f secular joys. She needs to go. Although the film version of The Sound of Music will shift “My Favorite Things” to the thunderstorm scene in which Marie offers up raindrops on roses and warm woolen mittens as balm to the terrified kids, John Coltrane’s classic jazz cover much more radically revamps the Broadway hit, transfiguring mere catchiness into complex modalities. Yet if this were simply a one-off recording, there wouldn’t be much to say: turning cornball consolation into jazz isn’t news. Instead, Coltrane can’t relinquish it. Instead, even throughout all his late music-as-prayer work, he never lets go of the show tune. “We played it every night for five years,” drummer Elvin Jones re­ membered. “We played it every night like there would be no tomorrow. Like it would be the last time we played it.” His son, Ravi Coltrane, calculates that his father’s band played “My Favorite Things” thousands o f times as a regular fixture in the set: “They worked a lo t— forty-five weeks a year, six nights a week, three sets, sometimes even four sets on the weekend. You’re talking about getting the blade as sharp as can be.” But of all the blades to w het— especially one bedecked with ponies and kittens— why that song in particular? M y f i r s t e n c o u n t e r with Coltrane’s late free jazz work came from an unlikely source: the writings o f cult rock critic Lester Bangs. At the age o f fourteen, I stumbled upon a copy of his collected writings— Psychotic 632 Reactions and Carburetor Dung— and proceeded to treat it as less an assem­ blage o f essays and music reviews than a checklist of writers and albums I was obliged to track down if I might ever break free from my Ohio sub­ urbs. The Velvet Underground, William Burroughs, Iggy and the Stooges’ Metallic K.O. (a live album in which you can hear beer bottles shattering against guitar strings), and even Baudelaire all first came tumbling my way through the same careening chute of Bangs’s writing. His claim that Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks was fueled by many lifetimes o f wisdom lured me into transcribing the entirety o f the album’s lyrics in my algebra notebook, and the visible bottom edge of an Undertones poster in his author photograph led me, without having heard a note o f the band’s music, to bike six miles to Spin More records in Kent on a quest to cobble together their discography. Sandwiched between articl.

1. M A T T D O N O V A N
Things in the Form o f
a Prayer in the Form
o f a Wail
H e r e ’s t h e j o u r n e y i n m i n i a t u r e .Oscar
Hammerstein, not long before stomach cancer kills him,
writes the song as a duet between Marie and the Mother Abbess,
for a
scene in which the plucky nun is told she’s being booted from
the con-
vent since she privileges melody over God. Marie doesn’t want
to serve
as governess for the Von Trapp clan, but she’s already shown
her hand
by giving rapturous voice to a song that summons the bliss and
solace
o f secular joys. She needs to go. Although the film version of
The Sound
of Music will shift “My Favorite Things” to the thunderstorm
scene in
which Marie offers up raindrops on roses and warm woolen
mittens as
balm to the terrified kids, John Coltrane’s classic jazz cover
much more
radically revamps the Broadway hit, transfiguring mere
catchiness into
complex modalities. Yet if this were simply a one-off recording,
there
wouldn’t be much to say: turning cornball consolation into jazz
isn’t

2. news. Instead, Coltrane can’t relinquish it. Instead, even
throughout all
his late music-as-prayer work, he never lets go of the show
tune.
“We played it every night for five years,” drummer Elvin Jones
re-
membered. “We played it every night like there would be no
tomorrow.
Like it would be the last time we played it.” His son, Ravi
Coltrane,
calculates that his father’s band played “My Favorite Things”
thousands
o f times as a regular fixture in the set: “They worked a lo t—
forty-five
weeks a year, six nights a week, three sets, sometimes even four
sets on
the weekend. You’re talking about getting the blade as sharp as
can be.”
But of all the blades to w het— especially one bedecked with
ponies
and kittens— why that song in particular?
M y f i r s t e n c o u n t e r with Coltrane’s late free jazz work
came from
an unlikely source: the writings o f cult rock critic Lester
Bangs. At the age
o f fourteen, I stumbled upon a copy of his collected writings—
Psychotic
632
Reactions and Carburetor Dung— and proceeded to treat it as

3. less an assem-
blage o f essays and music reviews than a checklist of writers
and albums I
was obliged to track down if I might ever break free from my
Ohio sub-
urbs. The Velvet Underground, William Burroughs, Iggy and
the Stooges’
Metallic K.O. (a live album in which you can hear beer bottles
shattering
against guitar strings), and even Baudelaire all first came
tumbling my
way through the same careening chute of Bangs’s writing. His
claim that
Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks was fueled by many lifetimes o f
wisdom
lured me into transcribing the entirety o f the album’s lyrics in
my algebra
notebook, and the visible bottom edge of an Undertones poster
in his
author photograph led me, without having heard a note o f the
band’s
music, to bike six miles to Spin More records in Kent on a quest
to
cobble together their discography.
Sandwiched between articles lauding the likes o f the Shaggs
and
Foghat was an autobiographical essay titled “John Coltrane
Lives.” In
that piece, Bangs recalls some drunken Stooges-esque jam
sessions with
his band in which he seizes a saxophone on impulse and uses it
as a force
o f destruction. “All I wanted to do was cut loose with a searing
Bronx
blast that would blow the roof off the place,” Bangs writes, and

4. proceeds
to fire off a series o f growls, screams, and wails. Or, as he
transcribes it:
“HONK! BLAT! SQUEEEE!” When his landlady arrives,
pounding on
the door and threatening to evict him for the noise, he wields
his tenor
sax as a weapon and claims direct inspiration by Coltrane.
“Trane laid his
hand on my brow once more, and I didn’t need paltry words to
reply,” he
writes, and the imagined benediction amplifies his one-off
“BLAT!” into
“SHKRIEEE! G R R U G H R R G LO N K -EE-ER N K !” as he
chases the
elderly woman out o f the apartment and down the stairs before
an off-
duty police officer named Butch Dugger drags him into the front
lawn,
drives a knee into his back, and cuffs him in the crabgrass.
“I s t a r t i n t h e m i d d l e ofa sentence,” Coltrane once
said, “and move
both directions at once.” Which is what I’d like to do here, even
if I too
am saddled with paltry words.
While Bangs’s grasp o f Coltrane’s work seems skewed, I also
suspect
some kind of correspondence between that landlady lash-out and
the
notion o f honing a song into a blade. Although Coltrane
himself privi-
leges spiritual quest and the serenity of prayer, I can’t help but
hear much
o f his music as somewhere between full-throttle anguish and a

5. wild swell
o f rage. In this I am not alone. “Why is it that I hear this
terrible inner
633
THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW
turmoil in those shrieks?” Ravi Shankar once asked about
Coltrane’s
sound. “It really disturbed m e.” And for some reason, even
after Coltrane’s
famous claim that he hoped to become a saint, after the solemn
thrum o f
praise captured on A Love Supreme, after years o f albums in
which jazz
standards were renounced for searing blasts o f sound on albums
with
names like Meditations and Stellar Regions, he still kept
coming back to that
Sound of Music cover as a vessel, a tool, a means.
“ I’d never experienced anything like that in my life,”
saxophonist
Joe M cPhee once exclaimed, after seeing Coltrane play at the
Village
Gate, where “M y Favorite Things” w ould have been a nightly
fixture. “I
thought I was just going to explode right in the place. T he
energy level
kept building up, and I thought, G od Almighty, I can’t take it.”
N o matter what direction a sentence moves, how do you
characterize

6. its syntax when the subject is love for cream-colored ponies and
crisp
apple strudel while the predicate is transcendence, apotheosis, a
searing
blat that can’t help but reach the ears o f God?
A t t h e c o n c l u s i o n ofjam es Baldwin’s short story
“Sonny’s Blues,”
nothing is resolved— not the relationship o f the estranged
brothers, nor
the story’s ongoing sense o f m uted despair, already palpable in
the open-
ing description o f the passengers’ reflections in the subway car,
“trapped
in the darkness which roared outside.” Before the final
nightclub scene,
there’s a lengthy conversation between Sonny and the narrator,
and hope-
lessness is the presiding mood: both agree that in this world
“there’s no
way not to suffer,” and, not long after Sonny admits he hasn’t
kicked his
heroin addiction, he looks out o f the apartment w indow and
delivers a
devastating diagnosis: ‘“All that hatred down there,’ he said,
‘all that hatred
and misery and love. It’s a w onder it doesn’t blow the avenue
apart.”
The story never denies Sonny’s view o f the world. Instead, by
way o f a
reply, the two brothers head out to the club where Sonny will
play some
standards on the piano with a small jazz quartet. You no doubt
rem em -
ber the scene, yet any familiarity with that final rhapsodic m om

7. ent also
makes it easy to forget the story’s insistence that the catharsis
is contin-
gent upon the listener:
All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear
it. And even then, on rare occasions when something opens
within,
and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear
corroborated, are
personal, private vanishing evocations. But the man who creates
the
music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising
from
634
M att Donovan
the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is
evoked in
him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no
words,
and triumphant too for that same reason.
Let me admit from the outset that my response to “M y Favorite
Things”
is fueled by just such private, vanishing evocations. As a
teenager, I know
I never heard— and perhaps still don’t properly hear— the
nuances o f
C oltrane’s craft. I wasn’t interested in any imposed order, but
craved in-
stead that roar from within the void.

8. W hich is why, I think, when I finally pulled the trigger and
purchased
M y Favorite Things, that indispensable, five-star, must-have-
for-all-jazz-
aficionados album, I felt disappointment. The slim soprano sax
that C ol-
trane cradled on the cover looked like a toy hatchet w hen
compared to
his axe-sixed tenor, and he stood against a tepid backdrop o f
blue that
might well have been plucked from The Sound of Musics
Technicolor sky.
W henever I listened to the title track, I couldn’t shake the
image ofjulie
Andrews running giddily through the mountains, twirling with
con-
tentm ent, unabashed by her hokey happiness. I couldn’t help
but think
o f the last time I had watched The Sound of Music, still in my
zippered
footy PJs and single-digit years, hunkered down around the
television
with my family and an icy m ug o f root beer. As a kid keen to
flee O hio,
I wasn’t interested in any nostalgic backward glance. Far
preferable to
any sentence running in both directions at once was a syntax
that never
glanced back, that only sprinted forward, dashing from the
suburbs until
it reached a smoke-filled, Village Vanguard corner booth.
Recently, my oldest son showed me an online GIF. There was
the iconic
opening scene— Julie Andrews spinning across a m ountaintop

9. — except
now she was firing two Uzis someone had added into the
footage. She
whirled and beamed, spewing a hail o f bullets, then casually
dropped her
weapons into the wildflowers. Perhaps that’s the kind o f
badass, irrever-
ent rampage I was looking for in Coltrane’s cover o f the
Broadway tune.
“Lively, with spirit,” the sheet music for “M y Favorite Things”
instructs,
but rather than some commonplace joie de vivre, the song that I
craved
was something closer to scattershot rage.
W h e n C o l t r a n e p l a y s “My Favorite Things” in a bit
o f black-and-
white footage from 1961, there’s a prayerlike stance about him.
Impeccably
dressed in a sport coat and black shirt, he stands stock still, and
for a while
his only visible movem ent is the quick flicker o f his fingers
and lips.
635
T H E M A S S A C H U S E T T S RE VI E W
In these opening riffs, the melody is clear, the m icrophone is
aimed
down, and his horn remains close to his body. All through his
first solo he
never looks up, and seems to be thinking hard about how to
turn breath

10. into song. It’s only after Eric Dolphy and M cC oy Tyner have
taken their
turns soloing, riffing, and sweating through the song’s bars that
at last he
seems not to need to think at all. H e joins the flute for a final
melodic
ascent— These are a few of my favorite things— before
furrowing his brow,
pinching his face tight, and pouncing on a high-register note. W
hen the
melody returns, it’s scuffed and frayed, as if just getting back
from a long
journey. The man sways, and his knees bend, and the sax lunges
skyward
as he lets loose with a held-back, hard-earned wail.
T h e q u a r t e t i s milling around, and the set hasn’t begun
yet. W atch-
ing from the back corner o f the bar, Baldwin’s narrator realizes
that,
even though the band is merely goofing off, killing time before
they
play, everyone is avoiding stepping into the stage’s spotlight.
It’s as if,
he thinks, should one o f them plunge into that light
prematurely, “they
w ould perish in flames.”
Contrast this beautiful, ritualized seriousness from the end o f
“Sonny’s
Blues” with the untrained, bravado way I took up the saxophone
as a
teenager. I, too, w ould often delay sounding any notes, but not
out o f
deference for tradition or the implied sacredness in forging
song. Play-

11. ing hooky from high school, w ith my tenor slung around my
neck, I
donned the closest thing that I had to a beret (my grandfather’s
discarded
plaid cap, w ith a hole charred in the center from that time I
thought it
w ould make a fine lampshade) and blared late, freestyle
Coltrane from
my turntable, studying my reflection in the m irror while
hacking my way
through a Pall Mall. Instead o f running scales, I practiced
pouring smoke
from my lips. I squinted, exhaled, and fussed with the tuft o f
hair that
curled through the cap’s hole in the shape o f a just-begun
question mark.
As m u s i c c r i t i c i s m , my adolescent response to
“Favorite Things” is
reductive blasphemy, I know, but I also don’t think I can
account for that
first indifferent shrug as merely pearls before a punk-craving
swine.
Listen: if you’re able to hear that melody’s lilt w ithout
plugging in hokey
shorthand for your happy place— snowflakes, and those blue
satin sashes,
and, for little discernible reason, doorbells— all the better for
you. O ther-
wise, like me, no matter the complexities o f Coltrane’s modal
journey,
you’ll always end up straddled by those corny lyrics preaching a
sentimental
636

12. M att Donovan
efficacy: think about a copper kettle, and you w on’t feel lousy
anymore.
Contentm ent is merely a thought away, and adversity— those
allegorical
dog bites and bee stings— is easily vanquished. Rem em ber
that boast of
“simply,” every time the chorus rolls around?
And then there’s the unavoidable way the song is hitched to the
baggage
o f American musicals. Whereas the art form o f jazz is
contingent on spon-
taneity, the linchpin o f the musical is a pretense of impromptu
synchronic-
ity. Instead o f the lonely night after night soul-spelunking
required o f the
jazz soloist, the musical offers, for instance, some tentative
trashcan tapping
on a faux street corner that, w ithout fail, crescendos into a
chorus of
forced-smile virtuosic extras swiveling, leaping, foxtrotting,
and ass-
waggling precisely on the beat.
I n 1965, a S a n F r a n c i s c o couple intended to celebrate
a first w ed-
ding anniversary with an evening on the tow n and a jazz-club
prowl. But
w hen Coltrane took the stage at the Jazz W orkshop, they
received what
was dubbed a Sound Baptism, experiencing w hat seemed like

13. “the trans-
ference o f the Holy Ghost through sound.” Inspired by a sense
o f spiri-
tual revelation and eager to spread the word, they launched the
Jazz Club,
which began as an ad-hoc listening party that grew into the
Yardbird
Club, which in turn beget the new spiritual mandate o f the
Yardbird
Temple, which became the O ne M ind Temple, which was more
fully
know n as the O ne M ind Temple Evolutionary Transitional
Body of
Christ, which then expanded beyond Christian faith into a house
for
spiritual universalism know n as the Vedantic Center, which
ended up as
the Saint John W ill-I-A m Coltrane African O rthodox Church.
W henever I happen to be in San Francisco, I think about
attending a
service at the Coltrane church. T here’s an undeniable appeal in
joining
a congregation to bask in Coltrane’s sound. Yet ever since
breaking from
my ow n Lutheran upbringing as a young teenager, I’ve also
retained, for
better or worse, a lingering unease toward codified scripture o f
any kind,
and I haven’t yet made a Sunday pilgrimage to that church.
T here’s a story about Coltrane hosting fellow tenor sax player
Wayne
Shorter at his apartment, and asking him if he was familiar w
ith prin-
ciples o f cosmic consciousness and Om. But Shorter’s belly

14. was already
grumbling for the spaghetti sauce he could smell cooking in the
kitchen;
forever after, he w ould equate the principles o f Om with the
notion
o f “hom e,” where pasta sauce simmers deliciously on
stovetops. N ow
there’s a spiritual center— with its literal hungers and real
pining for
637
T H E M A S S A C H U S E T T S R E V I E W
pleasure — that 1 understand. These days, I’d experience more
religious
fulfillment listening to A Love Supreme while scraping banana-
clumped
batter from our waffle iron than hearing the album play while
sitting in
a pew after receiving my meditation instructions.
And yet, no matter how I remain baffled by the concept of the
Holy
Ghost, or how my post-Christian hang-ups seem to thwart my
under-
standing of an “anointed sound,” I can still get behind
Coltrane’s hope to
be elevated to the status of a saint. Let me be clear: if we were
talking
about the canonization of almost anyone else, I’d be reaching
for my well-
worn George Orwell maxims. “The essence o f being human is
that one

15. does not seek perfection,” he wrote in an essay indicting Gandhi
— Gan-
dhi!— for his spiritual aspirations, arguing that “sainthood is
also a thing
that human beings must avoid.” But this is Coltrane, who,
according to
jazz legend, used to cobble together additional practice time by
striding
off the stage after his own solos, cloistering himself in the
men’s room to
run his scales while the other musicians took their turns
soloing, rejoin-
ing his band just as the song’s chorus rolled back around. This
is Trane,
whose perfection took the form o f full-throated squawks and
wails, and
whose oft-quoted hope that he’d obtain sainthood should never
be
stripped o f its full stutter-filled context. Here’s the verbatim
transcript
from his interview in Japan, where he first made the claim:
Ennosuke Saito: . . . ah, what, o r— and how, ah, you would
like to be
in, uh, ten or twenty years later. H ow you— you would like to
be,
well, in, uh, what kind of, uh, situation, you would like to, uh,
um,
establish.
Coltrane: As a, as a musician, or what, as a person? O r —
Saito: Um, let’s say about— as a, as a person.
Coltrane: In music, o r— as a person. . . I would like to be a
saint.
[John Coltrane laughs.]

16. Lose the lead-up, and you miss the human fumbling that
precedes his
off-the-cuff hope for apotheosis. There’s the desire for
sainthood, yes, but
it’s a hope for perfection couched in confusion, in stammering,
laughter,
and an inability to say.
F o r a w h i l e , the music at the end o f “Sonny’s Blues”
hasn’t yet co­
alesced. The narrator watches his brother’s face at the piano,
and suspects
that he’s being held back. Then, without warning, the double
bass band-
leader launches into “Am I Blue?,” a workhorse standard that
becomes a
638
M att Donovan
vehicle for transcendence. “Something began to happen,” the
narrator
states baldly, as if initially too awestruck to say anything more
about the
way the music began to truly churn. The instruments begin to
speak to
each other in entirely new ways, and their chatter becomes the
blues, an
“amen” that opens the way for Sonny to venture into deeper
waters and
make the melody his.

17. Contrast that rapture to my own short-lived flirtation w ith
playing
tenor sax during my college days. Although I may have moved a
bit be-
yond merely posturing in the m irror (I dutifully ran my blues
scales, and
for a while I could fumble through “Lover M an”), 1 never
really outgrew
the idea o f treating the instrument as anything other than a
Bangs-esque,
axelike implement o f aggression.
H ere’s a quick sketch o f one o f our jam sessions in the
basement o f
our college apartment. First, and w ithout fail, w e ’d pass
around a pipe
and get stoned. T h en the drum m er w ould start tapping out a
rhythm,
the bass w ould drop in, the guitarist would jangle out some
chords, and,
eventually, priding myself on holding back in these first
moments (in lieu
o f actual musicianship, I could offer my fellow band members
about ten
minutes o f tame melodic playing), I’d begin some kind o f one-
note pulse,
itching to let loose with the BLAT! and SHKRIEEE! already
rising in
my throat. It was only a matter o f time, which means what I
played was
the opposite o f improvisation. Inevitably, our groove in C (the
only key
I was equipped to use) w ould rise to a fury o f puffed-cheek
overblowing
and a squall o f scattershot notes.

18. I shouldn’t disparage the musicianship o f my friends (some o f
them
were extremely talented, and one still plays music for a living
today),
but my own ineptitude was undeniable. W hat I hurled from the
sax was
angry, desperate noise, the equivalent o f a knees-bent scream, o
f releasing
air from a balloon, o f a guitarist specializing in whammy bar
wiggling.
And still. No matter how badly I played, I still loved losing
myself in that
exhausting storm. “If I feel physically as if the top o f my head
were taken
off, I know that is poetry, ’’Emily Dickinson famously wrote.
As much as I’ve
always loved that quote, I can’t claim to have ever felt that
sense o f ecstatic
near-decapitation from crafting an essay. O n lucky writing
days, after long
intervals o f watching the cursor pulse on the screen, or
questioning my
fumbled-after project, or staring out the window, looking for
birds in the
Russian olive in lieu o f actually tapping out any words, there’s
been a kind
of muted satisfaction in making a line, sentence, or paragraph—
through
whatever makeshift tactic I’ve seized— suck a little bit less.
639
T H E M A S S A C H U S E T T S R E V I E W

19. At the end o f those piss-poor jam sessions, if nothing else,
there was
catharsis in the form of panting, grinning, bleeding lips,
knowing the self
was poured forth and, for a moment, lost.
“ M y m u s i c , ” Coltrane once proclaimed in an interview,
“is a way of
giving thanks to God.” Yet that aphoristic claim belies the
complexities
o f how his gratitude manifested itself.
If Coltrane takes his cue from the book o f Psalms— in which
the
scripture urges praise through music, with the sound o f the
trumpet,
and harp plucking, and dance and stringed instruments and loud,
high-
sounding cymbals— imagine a clamor that combines all o f
those sounds
at once. Imagine thanks in the form of furor, as a two-drummer
frenzy,
as explosion of breath and arpeggioed howl roaming the highest
notes.
Imagine praise akin to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,”
a poem
bookended by gratitude for the divine — “Glory be to God for
dap-
pled things” -— in which benediction becomes eclipsed by the
whirligig
sounds of words: skies o f couple-color, stippled rose-moles on
trout, and
“all that is swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.”
Take the phrase “sheets of sound” someone once coined to

20. describe
Coltrane’s style, and hitch it to a hymn that pummels, thrashes,
wrenches,
and lures, all within a few bars. Imagine a gratitude that flamed
so fiercely
it forced McCoy Tyner, no longer able to hear himself over the
wild blare
o f all that the praise, to finally drop out o f the band.
I n a n e a r l y poem by Emily Dickinson, the speaker
describes the after-
life as a place where we’ll no longer have to wonder why
humans suffer:
I shall know w hy— when Time is over—
And I have ceased to wonder w hy—
Christ will explain each separate anguish
In the fair schoolroom o f the sky—
He will tell me what “Peter” promised—
And I— for wonder at his woe —
I shall forget the drop of Anguish
That scalds me now — that scalds me now!
In heaven, everything about the human condition will be known.
And yet, somewhat incongruously, the speaker claims that even
after she
has “ceased to wonder why,” Christ will still cover the requisite
material,
prowling the rows o f desks in that empyrean classroom,
justifying each
640

21. M att Donovan
individual m om ent o f hum an anguish. These pro forma
explanations
seem far from consoling and inevitably raise pedagogical
questions. H ow
might this information on misery be disseminated? Will the
approach to
the material be chronological, or arranged into thematic units?
Will the
instructor need to begin again each time a straggler newcom er
arrives?
Will there be a final exam?
Nothing along these lines is answered in the poem. Instead, we
have
that frivolous contrivance o f heaven’s school— as childish a
notion as any
delight in mittens, kittens, and snowflakes— colliding with an
insistence on
anguish as an inherent part o f the human condition. The
certainty o f what
awaits— eternal life, proximity to God’s grace, relief from
mortal suffer-
ing— mitigates nothing while we plod across this earth. There’s
no balm in
G od’s promises: instead, in that last line, there’s only the
speaker’s fierce and
burning anguish, playing out as blurted exclamations she’s
forced to repeat.
So w h y “M y Favorite Things”? O f all the songs to choose
from, o f all
the jazz standards to use as prayer, o f all tunes to forge into
blade?

22. Coltrane’s own account doesn’t necessarily offer up any clues.
“Some
times, we have to live with a tune for quite a while, and other
times we
just fall into it. N ow , ‘[My] Favorite Things,’ a fella said, ‘W
hy don’t you
try this tune?’ I told him I wanted some music, and so I bought
the song
sheet and took it to rehearsal, and just like that, we fell right
into it.” His
account depicts the dive, but forgoes explaining the choice to
jum p in,
let alone remain in the pool forevermore.
Perhaps it has something to do with the song’s musical
structure: the
modulation o f chords, the melody’s ascension, what its
waltzlike move-
m ent affords as improvisational springboard. O r perhaps
there’s something
to be said for the fact it scored Coltrane an early radio hit. N o t
long after
recording that album, he was asked how m uch time he was
finding to
practice. “N ot too m uch,” Coltrane replied, “because I got to
make three
records a year. I’m always walking around trying to keep my ear
open for
another ‘Favorite Things’ or something. . . Commercial, m an.”
N o matter the actual reason, I myself can’t help but hear a cue
in those
original lyrics in w hich there’s the implacable, unapologetic
lens o f the
“ I.” In which there’s list-making, amassing, a gathering, a
hauling-in o f

23. subjective loves. In which, no matter how much the song is
transfigured,
the mantra o f melody’s impulse remains: notice, enumerate,
take solace,
praise, repeat.
All o f which, I should admit, is, in my own writing, one o f my
favoi >te
641
T H E M A S S A C H U S E T T S R E V I E W
things: to relish guesswork, bewilderment, the absence o f why.
To find the
spiritual within secular kitsch is a blade I can’t help but whet.
L a t e v e r s i o n s o f “My Favorite Things” typically began
with a long bass
solo by Jimmy Garrison. W henever I hear those recordings,
with their me-
andering introductions that willfully keep the melody at bay, I
never fail to
think about a night when I watched a man play the double bass
on a beach.
O n a lark, I had driven from O hio to jo in a friend w ho was
w ork-
ing hotel jobs in Ocean City, Maryland, and after too many
evenings o f
bourbon and weed, o f threats and jeers from the drunk
fraternity brothers
who stalked the boardwalk, o f failing to even begin the short
story that I

24. had pledge to write, I lay sprawled on the beach, hungover and
aimless. I
can’t rem ember how long I lay there, staring at the stars,
listening to the
surf, thinking not m uch beyond the self-pity and loneliness I
felt, before
I heard some kind o f distant thrum and sat up to see a man
close to the
water on a low-tide beach, playing his stand-up bass.
I have no idea what he played— the tumbling waves swallowed
up most
o f the notes— or if there even was a melody to what he made.
Mostly, I
watched his body move: his sway and pivot, the way his
shoulders lifted and
dropped, the odd off-the-beat shuffle o f his feet. He plucked
hard at the
low-register notes, and would pause and hold still for a moment,
clutching
his instrument, letting the sound he’d made ring out into the
night, letting
it say whatever it said, before the ocean swallowed it up and he
began again,
plucking, strumming, palm-slapping some other almost-song.
I know in that m om ent I didn’t think about the way he faced
the sea,
but it seems to matter now. It matters that he had hauled his …