‘A Centennial Salute to Toots Thielemans’

A Belgian-born harmonica virtuoso, Toots Thielemans had been a professional musician for more than 70 years at the time of his death at 94 in 2016. His was a kind of a mega-career that encompassed many important mini-careers: a giant of jazz, a star on the international music scene, a composer, and a prominent studio musician in the worlds of both pop and film soundtracks — even beyond his long collaboration with Quincy Jones. (You can’t miss his unmistakable sound behind Michael Jackson in “The Wiz,” 1978.)

At Dizzy’s, a group of Thielemans’s sidemen and acolytes just paid tribute to his centennial, which, like that of saxophone colossus Frank Wess at Birdland, actually occurred a year ago. Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor “Toots” Thielemans was that rare non-American to receive America’s greatest award for his music, when, in 2009, he was named as an NEA Jazz Master. Yet though he lived much of his life in the U.S., he maintained a distinctly global vision.  

Thielemans was already playing accordion and then harmonica professionally during World War II, when Nazi soldiers were marching up and down the streets of his native Brussels. He later picked up the guitar after hearing Django Reinhardt, and then apprenticed and toured extensively with the two biggest stars of European jazz, violinist Stephane Grappelli and pianist George Shearing.

Whenever I saw Thielemans, usually at the Blue Note in the 1990s and 2000s, I was at first somewhat surprised — though I shouldn’t have been — that he had turned his attention toward still another style of music and a whole other continent. His later music was almost exclusively focused on Brazil and that wide range of sounds and songs that are summarized in the collective term “bossa-nova.”  

His most frequent partner in these projects was an American pianist — Kenny Werner, who grew up on Long Island no less — one who, like Toots, is at home in a wide range of styles. One never knows where Mr. Werner is going to turn up next, with cutting-edge saxophone star Joe Lovano or Broadway’s Betty Buckley.

Joining Mr. Werner at the Dizzy’s show were two contemporary international jazz stars, clarinetist Anat Cohen of Tel-Aviv and harmonica master and co-leader Gregoire Maret of Geneva. Mr. Maret is the closest thing to a full-fledged successor to Thielemans, who in one of his last appearances on a recording appeared as a special guest on the younger man’s 2011 self-titled album, “Gregoire Maret.” In fact, their two-harmonica duet is a highlight of that album, and, not surprisingly, it’s on a Brazilian song, “O Amor E O Meu Pais,” by Ivan Lins.

The Dizzy’s show began on a powerful, low-key note with a duet between Messrs. Werner and Maret essaying one of Thielemans’s favorite songs, Henry Mancini’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Thielemans famously recorded this on “Affinity,” a 1977 meeting with Bill Evans, but where that arrangement switches tempos several times, Messrs. Maret and Werner played it slowly and soulfully, like a true memorial to the man they were celebrating.  

Following this opener, Ms. Cohen and the rest of the group came on stage: guitarist Chico Pinheiro, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Antonio Sánchez. The first number by the full sextet was one of two modern jazz standards in offbeat time signatures, Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” — the title of a 1990 Thielemans album — in 6/4, and Jaco Pastorius’s “Three Views of A Secret” in 3/4, a song Thielemans helped launch alongside the composer in 1980.

The rest of the set was solidly worldly: “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” by Toots’s Belgian countryman, Jacques Brel, was another stunning duo by Messrs. Maret and Werner. There was a medley of two Jobim classics, “Wave” and “Chega De Saudade,” and one of his favorite Brazilian songs, Ivan Lins’s “Comecar de Novo,” known in English as “The Island.” Along the way, they hit “All the Things You Are” and finished with Thielemans’s best-known composition, the jazz waltz “Bluesette.”

The set was graced by an abundance of sincerity, passion, and sonic euphoria. Apart from the piano-harmonica duos, some of the most stunning sounds were from the unique frontline combination of Mr. Maret’s “mouth organ” with Ms. Cohen’s clarinet. 

Then, too, Mr. Werner made full use of a digital keyboard with synthesizer to supplement the background. Normally, when we hear such sounds, we tend to think of the synth as a low-budget substitute for a proper string section. Yet Mr. Werner is such an eloquent player with such a personal sound that he upgrades the digital keyboard into a proper instrument unto itself.  

This, of course, is exactly what Toots Thielemans spent a lifetime doing for the harmonica.