It popped up often when I watched sporting events on tv as a kid. Thielemans whistled the Old Spice aftershave ad of the 1970s. He put juvenile spring in the song’s step he was cool yet uncondescending. From the debut of Sesame Street in 1969 and for the next four decades Thielemans’s harmonica gave color and flair to the anemic groove of the theme as heard at the close of the show. Big Bird brought him more celebrity than his association, however fleeting, with that other Bird-Charlie Parker.
Those adaptable gifts brought him his greatest, literally unsung, popularity-tunes and textures engraved on millions of memories. Thielemans was also a fabulous whistler, expressive and exact, and could accompany himself on guitar, doubling the melody on his lips with his fingers on the strings. When he discovered Django’s music as a teenager, Thielemans taught himself the guitar and was initially hired by Goodman on that instrument. Thielemans’s saw the movies in a cinema in the same Brussels street where his parents ran a pub. His first instrument was the accordion, and he took up a miniature version of it-the harmonica-after he heard the American virtuoso of the mouth organ, Larry Adler, play in films of the 1930s. He was a genius not just of invention but of adaptation. In 2022 that seems oddly right: if ever there were a sound that was disembodied and uncannily, physically, paradoxically palpable, it was Thielemans’s. The internet has algorithmicized the zeitgeist, has become it-or vice-versa. I had already had plans to offer a tribute to the great harmonica player before Google Doodled him. With the aid of Wikipedia, I keep a vague eye on upcoming musical anniversaries, centennials and such of celebrated and not-so-celebrated composers, pieces, recordings, and performances. Inspired by fellow Belgian Django Reinhardt, whom he counted as his most lasting and lyrical influence, Thielemans jammed with Charlie Parker, toured with Benny Goodman, was befriend by Louis Armstrong, gloried in countless concerts and recordings with a decades-spanning succession of luminaries. He lived through a long stretch of jazz history, helped make that history. He made it almost that far, still playing concerts within two years of his death in 2016 at the age of 94. The amiable Thielemans would have been 100 today. Both hands, always moving when he played, were motionless as they held his harmonica to his mouth.Įven though there was no sound, I immediately heard the haunting yet happy cry of his instrument, one that could pose in fragile melancholy, then in the next instant fire off lightning bolts of bebop. There was a colorful tableau of jazz signs-piano keyboard, drumstick on cymbal, trumpet, clarinet- with Toots Thielemans at the center of the image, mustache and chunky eyeglasses and the shock of white hair of his late years.
When I sat down this morning to write my column on my laptop, the day’s Google Doodle greeted me.
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