I've actually seen an interpretation of Coltrane that claimed that his aim in playing "My Favorite Things" was to destroy Richard Rodger's song. The writer was trying to make it into a racial issue. I wish I could find it and refute it point by point. I think I saw it quoted in the first chapter of a book on Baraka.

A more subtle version of this fallacy is that jazz musicians raise basically middle-brow (or low brow) music to the level of high art. The problem here is that jazz musicians don't see it in these terms. They wouldn't put themselves "above" their material in this way. Look at Ella's songbooks, for example.

This is a difficult question for me because I was raised on this dogma, so to speak, and have had to separate myself from it. I should have never read all those books by Martin Williams. (I should have read them, but rejected certain implications therein.) I still hold to my interior hierarchies of value, of course. My love for the "high-brow" jazz tradition does not prevent me from loving things that do not necessarily rise to this level.