Toots Thielemans

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Toots Thielemans sticks out in the jazz crowd–and not just because his principal instrument is the harmonica, which belongs to folk and country music and is as rare as bagpipes in jazz. He’s a Belgian man who grew up on French tunes of the 1930’s; he’s an accidental musician who had planned to be a math teacher until he heard Louis Armstrong in 1942 and worked up his own sound playing for American GIs in Europe.

The postwar jazz innovators–Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, George Shearing–embraced Toots Thielemans’ bop-friendly lyricism, but he was and remained a star from another galaxy: he’s a whistler on his biggest hit, the jazz waltz “Bluesette”; he’s as familiar to Sesame Street kids as to jazz buffs; and a musician of a certain unjazzy melancholy, “between a smile and a tear,” as he says, “who goes for the heart,” Quincy Jones says, “and makes you cry.” Toots Thielesman is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Toots Thielemans, musician