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Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“This double CD may well contain the best Toots Thielemans you
NEVER heard. A stunning collection of both rare and great music, starting with
his earliest recording as a soloist and ending with a memorable duet in the new
millennium.”
- Jeroen de Valk
“Jean-Baptiste Frederic Isidor Thielemans was born in Brussels, April
29 1922 .
He never had any formal musical education but has been playing music for most
of his life. Already as a three-year old, he stated in many interviews, he was
playing the accordion in the bar his parents owned. He purchased a guitar and a
harmonica as a teenager and taught himself to play jazz while listening to
records during the occupation.”
- Jeroen de Valk
“Toots is Toots; his music is always emotionally engaging and fun
to listen to. He has a gift: he hears
it, he plays it. Some of the things that come out of his harmonic just take
your breath away.”
- The Editorial Staff at JazzProfiles
As part of the
celebration of Toots’ forthcoming 90th birthday, Cees Schrama, has selected
thirty-eight [38] tracks spanning over sixty [60] years of Thielemans’ career
and is issuing them on March 27, 2012 as a two CD set entitled Toots
Thielemans: Yesterday and Today [Out of the Blue T2CD2011052].
Much of the music
on this double CD retrospective has been hard to find for many years; some of
it has not been released before in a digital format; some of it has never been
released in the United States
The compilation is
a magnificent tribute to one of the world’s great musicians, whatever the
genre.
Whether you’ve
been a fan of Toots’ music for years or whether you are looking for a place to
begin to familiarize yourself with it, this presentation is a must for your
collection.
Aside from his more
notable associations over the years with George Shearing and Quincy Jones, also
represented in this collection are a slew of obscurities and oddities including
Toots’ performance in big band arrangements by Jack Andrews, Gary McFarland and
Ralph Burns, in small groups with J.J. Johnson, Hank Jones and Herbie Hancock, in
a gorgeous version of Alex North’s Love
Theme from Spartacus in a duo with bassist Marc Johnson and in a beautiful
solo rendering of Ellington’s Black
Beauty.
Toots is Toots;
his music is always emotionally engaging and fun to listen to. He has a gift: he hears it, he plays it. Some
of the things that come out of his harmonic just take your breath away.
Toots Thielemans: Yesterday
and Today [Out of the
Blue T2CD2011052] comes with a insert booklet that details background
information about the selected recordings, biographical information about
Toots’ career and a collection of photographs.
Here are some
excerpts as written and compiled by the noted Jazz writer and historian Jeroen
de Valk.
“Producer Cees
Schrama, a personal friend, selected all these treasures, looking for
recordings that follow Toots' long and impressive career and are hard or simply
impossible to purchase on CD. Some of the tracks -for example the 1946
recording, initially made as a soundtrack for a cartoon - were never issued
anywhere. Others - among them the tracks with George Shearing - were issued on
singles and then disappeared.
Cees got
assistance from two Thielemans-collectors, who provided him with a wealth of rare
material: Jean-Paul Gardavoir and Wim Crama. Studio wizard Marcel Booij managed
to re-master the sound of these at times primitive recordings.
The result is a
fitting tribute to Toots Thielemans, who was the second European musician to
develop a highly individual sound in the US-dominated jazz world. The first one
was, of course, guitarist Django Reinhardt. The latter was also born in Belgium
Toots started out
as a Django-inspired guitarist but became instantly recognizable when he
started whistling along with his guitar improvisations. More fame came when
listeners, musicians and producers discovered he was turning the chromatic
harmonica into a serious jazz instrument.
Cees - a
professional pianist and organist himself - first shook hands with Toots in
1974. Toots was performing then in Tros
Sesjun, a Dutch radio show that would last for over thirty years,
presenting live jazz every Thursday evening. Thielemans would be headlining the
show seven times. Cees, who hosted the show, heard that Thielemans had an
apartment in New York Europe at that time, where he had a second home
in Brussels
‘Toots played with
our house band featuring keyboard man Rob Franken, who would become his regular
accompanist. They started the concert with There
Is No Greater Love. A real dazzling virtuoso performance which made the
whole band swing like mad. He built up the tension and built and built... and
then, he managed to hold back for a while, allowing us to breath. I was
standing there in awe and thought: “This has to be put on record.” After the
concert, we had a talk and he agreed to have a selection of this concert put on
LP for Polydor, the label I was working for as a record producer.’
On this track, the
guitar solo is played by Joop Scholten. In all the other tracks on this twofer,
not only the harmonica solos but all the guitar solos were played by Toots as
well. Needless to say, this means that in some cases his contributions had to
be recorded separately.
Toots had no
manager at that time; he took care of all business matters himself. Cees: ‘He
did so with care. He was and still is extremely reliable. He is always on time,
wherever the gig may be, and always in peak form, musically. Always creative
and inspired. Even now, while approaching his ninetieth birthday, he still sits
up-front on the stage on a bar stool and does most of the playing himself.
Usually, he won't let his sidemen stretch out too long. People buy tickets to
hear him, so it's him we're going to hear. Toots has unbelievable stamina and
is consistently enthusiastic about music. Music is his life. He always carries
his harmonica around, wherever he is.’”
A year after his
Sesjun debut, Toots came back to the show, this time with his regular band,
which included Franken and the Danish bass legend Niels-Henning 0rsted
Pedersen. From this concert, That Misty
Red Animal (Dat Mistige Rooie Beest)
survives on this compilation. It was composed for the soundtrack of Turkish Delight (Turks Fruif), one of the many, many movies from both sides of the Atlantic in which Toots' harmonica can be heard.
Cees issued a
selection from both concerts on an LP, simply called Toots Thielemans Live.
Another year later, in 1976, Toots did his third Sesjun concert; parts from
this concert were available on the LP Toots Thielemans Live 2. ‘Both
albums were highly successful in Europe ,
the US Japan
Initially, Toots
planned to be a mathematics teacher and thus went to the Brussels University
Toots - who
borrowed his stage name from swing alto saxophonist Toots Mondello and
arranger/composer/ trumpeter Toots Camarata - played with various US New York Europe , before emigrating to the US
Thielemans may
have had a certain impact on The Beatles. In 1959, John Lennon saw Toots
performing with Shearing's band a couple of times. Lennon apparently liked
Toots' harmonica playing and guitar selection: a Rickenbacker. Lennon decided
to purchase a similar Rickenbacker himself and also adopted the chromatic
harmonica, which was used on the Beatles' early recordings.
By the time Toots
left Shearing's band, he found himself in constant demand as a first-call
studio musician. Producers liked his new sound, originated by whistling along
with his guitar lines, and used it in commercials. His harmonica can be heard
in countless film scores; Turkish Delight,
The Getaway and Midnight Cowboy, to name just a few. He is also heard on
recordings with popular singers such as Paul Simon, Billy Joel and Natalie
Cole.
Toots, though,
never forgot his jazz roots and both recorded and toured with Bill Evans, Jaco
Pastorius and many, many more. He kept touring with his own jazz outfits and
composed the jazz standard Bluesette.
…
Toots is still
working as I'm writing this, late 2011, although he limits himself to two,
three gigs a week. He is brought to his concerts and record dates with a
limousine, assisted by a tour manager.
Quincy Jones, the New York
As you would
imagine, it was very difficult to single out one track from the comprehensive
overview of Toots’ music contained in Toots Thielemans: Yesterday and Today [Out
of the Blue T2CD2011052].
Ultimately, in
order to page homage to both Toots and Cees Schrama, Toots long-time friend and
the producer of these recordings, I selected Big Bossa, a tune written by Cees for the Polydor LP Old
Friend [2925 029]. It features Toots along with Ferdinand Povel on
tenor saxophone in a wonderful arrangement by Cees which he scored for a full orchestra
including strings.
