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)
