Although the liner notes do not mention it, the choice of the title track, ‘My Favorite Things,’ was a conscious attempt by Coltrane to expose his playing to a wider audience. After playing Cannonball Adderley’s version of ‘Jive Samba’ over and over for a whole day on a diner jukebox, he realised how a modest hit recording could transform the career of a jazz artist and he acted accordingly.

‘My Favorite Things,’ played as a medium tempo waltz, was restructured by Coltrane and is key to understanding its success as a vehicle for jazz improvisation and why it’s not a Julie Andrews cover. The form, as Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote it for The Sound of Music, was AAB, but Coltrane initially plays the A sections, assigning the B section to function as a coda. The quartet follow the overall scheme whereby the soloist plays over an E minor vamp (Coltrane largely solos on the related Dorian mode which lends the modal feel to the piece). The tonality changes on cue to E major which marks the return of the A theme – Tyner returns to the theme in the middle of his solo when the accompaniment changes to E major, as does Coltrane in his solo, before returning to E minor to continue their solos. Only at the end do we hear the B section, in the related key of G major, that brings the performance to a conclusion with a neat sense of resolution.

Although this was not the first album on which Coltrane used a soprano saxophone, as is often claimed (that was on The Avante-Garde with Don Cherry from June/July 1960), it was hugely effective on this tune, which many people thought was close to the sound of Middle Eastern instruments, lending a mysterious, incantatory feel to the performance, prompting many critics to assert Coltrane was introducing ragas to jazz. The performance, 14 minutes in all, was edited down for a 45 rpm single which garnered sufficient radio play to become the minor hit Coltrane sought.

This 60th Anniversary package presents both the stereo and mono versions of the album. Hitherto, the mono version was thought to be ‘lost’ – it didn’t appear on the 2016 Atlantic five album box set John Coltrane In Mono, for example – but apparently has only recently been rediscovered. Without wishing to reawaken the ‘Stereo versus Mono’ debate, we pass quickly on to the new liner booklet, which is full of subjective impressions about the music that add little to what we knew already. The remaining three tracks, ‘Every time We Say Goodbye,’ ‘Summertime,’ and ‘But Not For Me’, are also of interest: the latter reflects Coltrane’s then current exploration of thirds and their interrelationships, so evoking the harmonies used in ‘Countdown’ during his improvisation, while ‘Summertime’ remains true to Gershwin’s form of ABAC (with each section four bars) but with added modal implications.

This is Coltrane in a state of becoming, something that would be realised in his subsequent Impulse! period.