Before today, I would not have chosen "My Favorite Things" by John Coltrane as the greatest album of all time.
But there are a lot of greatest albums of all time. More and more all the time.
And anyway, this happened:
We decided to get a record player here in our new city in France. It suits the charms of our darling and cozy little attic apartment. We bought a really cheap one from a store called Darty. It's kind of a little suitcase record player and reminds me of one handed down to me from my sister almost 50 years ago. It fits beautifully on a narrow built-in media cabinet we have in our apartment until you open it to play a record. Then it doesn't fit anymore. So we bought a phillips head screwdriver from the hardware store more or less downstairs from us and unscrewed the lid hinges. It was perfect!
But we didn't have any albums.
So we went out to the local record stores on a rainy evening and were sad to find that... they aren't very good. And they're very expensive. The second one, called Yusumi, or something like that, was much better than the first, but very very expensive. However, we found a nice French copy of My Favorite Things by John Coltrane we wanted, but it cost the sun and the stars. So we looked at every other album in the Jazz section and nothing quite worked.
So, figuring just this once we could accept the whispers of fate, we bought My Favorite Things even though it was more expensive than our actual record player!
Which is kind of funny.
Today I made us some coffee as the sun was setting and we listened to it.
McCoy Tyner is the piano player and he is wonderful.
I mean, everyone is brilliant.
What am I supposed to say? All old Jazz albums sound like Christmas music, or maybe Christmas music from a perfect world. Maybe all the greatest albums of all time are recordings smuggled out of a perfect world.
Somewhere there is a perfect world.
And occasionally, rarely, if you look just so, it's right here.
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