My Favorite Things

John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" had already transformed this Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune into a modal jazz meditation before Ella Fitzgerald's version, but Fitzgerald takes a different path entirely. Where Coltrane expanded the song into metaphysics, Fitzgerald returns it to something warmer and more personal. The Nelson Riddle arrangement — if it is Riddle — maintains the waltz time of the original but deepens the orchestral texture, giving it a plush, late-night quality. Fitzgerald's voice finds something genuinely affectionate in the lyric's list of small pleasures, and she delivers each item — the whiskers on kittens, the bright copper kettles — with a warmth that transforms a catalogue into a kind of gratitude practice. The song's logic is consolation: when things go wrong, recall what is good. Fitzgerald seems to actually believe this, and that sincerity saves the performance from becoming whimsical. Her phrasing is loose and conversational, as if she is thinking of these things for the first time and finding genuine comfort in them. This is music for difficult mornings, for the practice of remembering what still holds when something important has broken. It asks you to take seriously the small specific things that constitute a life — and Fitzgerald, one of music's great humanists, is perhaps uniquely qualified to make that argument persuasively.