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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

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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 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 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 wild swell o f rage. In this I am not alone. “Why is it that I hear this terrible inner

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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 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 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

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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.

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 — 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.

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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 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 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

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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 “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 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

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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 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.]

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

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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.

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.

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.

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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 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

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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?

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 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

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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 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 instrument to the edge o f the surf, then turned his back on the Goofy G olf and custard shops and the spinning cages o f the boardwalk rides and played something that became an answer to the ocean’s endless roar.

W hich m ight be one way to describe those late, solo-bass introduc­ tions to “M y Favorite Things.” In those recordings, you hear Garrison playing what sounds like a mishmash o f grief and rage coupled with the virtuosic bravado o f a man strutting his stuff. H e plays with an urgency, a drive to make something that might be called a blessing, as fierce as any prayer might be.

I n t h e l a s t live recording made before his death (April 23, 1967, at the Olatunji Center o f African Culture in Harlem), Coltrane takes up his horn yet again on “M y Favorite Things.”

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T he song begins w ith seven minutes o f interrogations on the bass by Jim m y Garrison. T here’s strumming, plucking, some ponderous riffs fol­ lowed by w hat sounds like scales, then a wild lurching forward before locking into a groove. All the while, you can hear someone doing some­ thing with bells on stage, accompanied by some whispering, a door closing; a car horn, coughing, folks shifting in their seats. At last Coltrane picks up his sax, and begins to say a few things. W hat he has to express— I’ll say it again— is a barrage o f keens and bleats and percussive blasts that has little to do with whiskers on kittens and raindrops on roses. W hat he says sounds like the wail o f someone trying to take on something as immense as the sea— he will be dead from liver cancer within three m onths— and the song pitches and surges, urged forward by the drum ’s pummeled cymbals and toms that resembles a hailstorm.

W henever the familiar melody rears up, as it sporadically does during the thirty-five minutes o f the song, it seems like afterthought, an im pro­ vised quote rather than a distillation. Its effect upon the listener is not relief upon hearing something familiar, but rather a com pounding o f the music’s discord. It’s a rem inder o f how quickly melody can fade, how a foothold m ight be loosened, and how whatever you think you want to say— a quick ascending flare o f these-are-a-few-of-my— at times can’t help but be transfigured into an anguished stuttering blast.

Ultimately, the song doesn’t so m uch build to something as simply end. The music thrashes forward, giving no sign o f ever abating, before it suddenly begins to slow. The audience applauds— perhaps, I’m guessing, at the m om ent Coltrane removes the saxophone from his m outh — even before the song is done, smothering some o f the last smacks o f the drum.

I’m not quite sure how to account for this last recorded version o f “My Favorite Things.” I still don’t know why the piece ends there, nor how this serves as an act o f benediction, nor why yet again this is the chosen vehicle for devotion. It doesn’t help that the song was recorded in the flatten­ ing acoustics o f a converted gymnasium, nor that the greenhorn engineer botched the recording, causing the sound to drop sporadically into a single channel or occasionally drift into a wall o f indecipherable noise.

Yet perhaps my confusion is appropriate. To hear prayer perfectly has nothing to do with being hum an— that w ork is relegated to the divine. A would-be saint performs for the second-to-last tim e— his final testimony lost, or no one bothered to record it— a song that’s no longer recogniz­ able, one that he could never not play. It’s frenzied, baffling, urgent, and inevitably botched, as all hum an grace must be.

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W O R K S C I T E D Bangs, Lester. John Coltrane Lives, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor D ung

(New York: Knopf, 1987). Kahn, Ashley. A Love Supreme: The Story o f John Coltrane’s Signature Album

(New York: Viking, 2002). Ratliff, Ben. Coltrane: The Story o f a Sound (New York: Picador, 2008). Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews, ed. Chris DeVito (Chicago:

Chicago Review Press, 2010).

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