‘My Favorite Things’ is a key item in Coltrane’s discography. He had already recorded some sides for Atlantic Records but these had been made with pick-up groups and showed ‘Trane’ very much in the accepted hard bop idiom, albeit making grand strides forward with his playing and harmonic searching. Here though, was the first album recorded with his new working outfit with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones (Steve Davis, although perfectly capable was merely the first in a line of bassists Coltrane worked his way through before settling on Jimmy Garrison). The music created for this album in late 1960 differed radically from what had preceded it as Coltrane forged his own pioneering path drawing on the modal experiments he’d been involved in with his final leader, Miles Davis.
