The Doors
Jim Morrison found Ray Manzarek on Venice Beach in the summer of 1965 and read him a poem he'd been keeping in his head; Manzarek, a UCLA film-school classmate with jazz training, told him they should start a band on the spot. What they built around that dare was strange from the start: a keyboardist standing in for a bassist, a jazz-schooled drummer in John Densmore, and a guitarist, Robby Krieger, who'd trained on flamenco before he ever touched an electric. That mix of backgrounds gave the band its signature move — treating a rock song like it could hold a jazz solo's patience, a hymn's dread, and a garage band's noise all at once, with Morrison's voice cutting through as the one instrument nobody else could supply.
When the band worked up Krieger's pop tune into the seven-minute version they'd actually record, Manzarek reached for a record he knew from his own jazz training. "Here's where John Coltrane comes in," he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross, tracing the solo section back to Coltrane's reworking of "My Favorite Things" — different key, same shape. "The left hand is exactly the same thing," he said, describing how he'd taken Coltrane's pianist's vamp and simply moved it to fit the song's own key. It wasn't an influence he was shy about; he named it outright, mid-interview, like handing over a recipe.
listen forOn Coltrane's "My Favorite Things," the piano sits under the saxophone in a repeating, almost droning figure — two chords rocking back and forth while Coltrane's soprano stretches out overhead, in no hurry to resolve anything. Cue up the extended version of "Light My Fire" and listen to Manzarek's organ solo: the left hand keeps working that same rocking two-chord vamp, just transposed, while his right hand takes the Coltrane role, circling and building over a rhythm section that never breaks the trance. It's the clearest place in the Doors' catalog where you can hear the jazz record underneath the rock one.