Things in the Form of a Prayer in the Form of a Wail

Here’s the journey in miniature.

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 convent 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 of 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 remembered. “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 of times as a regular fixture in the set: “They worked a lot—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 whet—especially one bedecked with ponies and kittens—why that song in particular?

My first encounter with Coltrane’s late free jazz work came from an unlikely source: the writings of cult rock critic Lester Bangs. At the age of fourteen, I stumbled upon a copy of his collected writings—Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung—and proceeded to treat it as less an assemblage of 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 suburbs. 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 of wisdom lured me into transcribing the entirety of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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! GRRUGHRRGLONK-EE-ERNK!” as he chases the elderly woman out of the apartment and down the stairs before an off-duty police officer named Butch Dugger drags...