VIDEO – MUSICAL INTERLUDE –

Jan./Feb. 2024 – Looking back at the moment when one of our greatest jazzmen raised the stakes for everyone who came after. They gathered one afternoon in late October of 1960, at the Atlantic Records studios in a nondescript building at 234 West 56th Street in New York: pianist McCoy Tyner, just 21, a prodigy from Philadelphia; Steve Davis, upright bass, 31, also from Philly; and Elvin Jones, at 33 a veteran drummer who had played with everyone from Art Farmer and Pepper Adams to Gil Evans and Miles Davis. And then there was John Coltrane, 34, already widely acknowledged as the next great jazz saxophonist, following Charlie Parker’s death in 1955. The little band had been playing together since May.

It was the first proper recording session for the John Coltrane Quartet—and it promptly produced one of the greatest moments in jazz history: Coltrane’s rendition of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things.” A regular had recently shown Coltrane the sheet music one night at the Jazz Gallery, a club on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, and Coltrane thought he could make something of it.

“We took it to rehearsal and, just like that, fell right into it,” Coltrane said in a 1961 interview.

WATCH@Smithsonian