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.
In 1929 E.Y.”Yip” Harburg was a co-owner of the Consolidated Electrical Appliance Company. He wrote poetry, which was sometimes published in the local newspapers. After the stock market crash Harburg was unemployed and $50,000 in debt. His high school and college friend, George Gershwyn introduced Harburg to composer Jay Gorney and the two went to work writing songs for a show Earl Carroll’s Sketchbook. Harburg and Gorney collaborated on several shows, including the 1932 production Americana, for which they wrote Brother Can You Spare A Dime. The song was recorded in 1932 by both Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby. Both recordings were hits and became the soundtrack of the 1932 Presidential election, in which Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover.
Yip Harburg went on to write lyrics to many Broadway shows and Hollywood musicals. His best known work was The Wizard of Oz, for which he was the head screenwriter in addition to collaborating with Harold Arlen on all of the songs.
I heard a wonderful analysis of Brother Can You Spare A Dime on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning, by composer Rob Kapilow. Here is Bing Crosby’s 1932 recording, set to a series of photos from the Great Depression.
During the 1950s and 60s, with Monk, Parker, Gillespie and Coltrane, jazz entered into a sphere that was sometimes difficult for audiences to understand. Like the classical, or as they referred to themselves “serious” composers of the same period dissonance and odd rhythms were everywhere. The difference being that, of course, the jazz musicians were improvising this stuff. I found this quote on a Thelonious Monk website: “You know, anybody can play a composition and use far-out chords and make it sound wrong. It’s making it sound right that’s not easy.”
Typically a piece of jazz from this period will have a composed “head” in beginning, a set piece, which will establish an identifiable key and chord progression, which the music will, mostly, follow. The piece can be identified by it’s head. If a recording is played, beginning somewhere after the head, it may not be evident what the band is playing at all. - Not to me anyway. The head is often repeated at the end.
I have chosen a performance of the Thelonious Monk Quartet filmed in Paris in 1969 Monk is accompanied by Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, Nate Hygelund on bass and Paris Wright on drums. The tune is Straight No Chaser. At one time I had an LP of solo piano by Monk of which this was the title tune. Perhaps because of this, Straight No Chaser seems more accessible to me than some of his other works. The “head” is easily recognizable and the improvised section more or less follows a I IV V blues like structure.
One day I was cruising YouTube, playing videos of various guitarists and I said to my wife " I'm just amazed that I can be sitting here watching Doc Watson's fingers for free." It dawned on me that it would be a valuable service to share these gems with other people. The videos posted here are the ones that really caught my eye.
