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Even if you have never heard of Toots Thielemans, I guarantee that you have heard his music, whether it’s the jaunty whistling on commercials for Old Spice, that familiar song you can’t quite name that came on the jazz station late at night (it’s called Bluesette), or playing harmonica on the closing credits for Sesame Street, Toots music permeates our culture.

Jean Thielemans was born in Brussels Belgium in 1922. He learned to played accordion, then harmonica and finally guitar as a child. In 1949 he sat in on a jam session with a few musicians, including Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Max Roach. Somehow he survived that ordeal and found himself in New York playing in Charlie Parker’s All Stars the next year. He has performend and recorded with a very long list of people over the years. A few of them are Quincy Jones, Bill Evans, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Astrud Gilberto, Shirley Horn, Elis Regina and Jaco Pastorius. Toots is still performing. In fact he is on an American tour right now.

His playing has a kind of musicality that is not always evident in modern jazz. Toots plays the melody, or if not , he plays his own melody, but it’s always melodic. He is fond of quoting from other pieces of music in the middle of an improvisation. Here is a sample, taken from a festival appearance, somewhere. On very sparse evidence I think it might be in Finland.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 8:52 am and is filed under jazz, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.