John Coltrane

★★★★★ My Favorite Things: 60th Anniversary Edition RHINO. CD/DL/LP

Iconic jazz album notches up three-score years; now remastered and repackaged. With his Atlantic debut album,

Giant Steps, released in 1960, Coltrane took bebop-based improvisation, with its vortices of rapid chord changes, to a stratospheric zenith that’s never been equalled in jazz; but the big challenge he faced afterwards was where to go next. He found the answer in modal jazz, where scales rather than chords became the basis for his improvisations, allowing greater creative freedom. The lengthy title track from 1961’s My Favorite Things, with its mesmeric groove, helped to popularise both the modal style and the overlooked soprano saxophone, making more of a quantum leap for jazz than

Giant Steps. The rest of the album, released in remastered mono and stereo formats for this reissue, highlights Trane’s versatility; from the feverish Summertime and blithely swinging But Not For Me to the gilded bittersweet lyricism of Everytime We Say Goodbye.