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There is little doubt that you have heard the music of Jean 'Toots' Thielemans. Perhaps his most famous composition is the theme to "Sesame Street," which he wrote and performed on his famous harmonica.he also wrote (or co-wrote with ray charles - still checking into that) and was the note for note whistler/guitarist on bluesette
The 80-year-old Thielemans is most famous for bringing the harmonica into jazz. Prior to his introducing it into modern jazz orchestras, the harmonica was viewed as a passe' instrument of folk music.
Thielemans played on the soundtracks of such movies as "Midnight Cowboy" and "The Wiz," and his harmonica has complemented singers ranging from Ella Fitzgerald, to Paul Simon to Billy Joel and many others.
This hour, Toots Thieleman brings his harmonica and his stories to On Point Friday.
go for baroque
peter schickele mix
sunday am
Mayhew's record is just one of several thousand cylinders, the first commercially available recordings ever produced, that have recently become available free of charge to anyone with an Internet connection and some spare bandwidth. Last November, the Donald C. Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, introduced the Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project Web site (cylinders.library.ucsb.edu), a collection of more than 6,000 cylinders converted to downloadable MP3's, WAV files and streaming audio. It's an astonishing trove of sounds: opera arias, comic monologues, marching bands, gospel quartets. Above all, there are the pop tunes churned out by Tin Pan Alley at the turn of the century: ragtime ditties, novelty songs, sentimental ballads and a dizzying range of dialect numbers performed by vaudeville's blackface comedians and other "ethnic impersonators."
For decades, these records languished unheard by all but a few intrepid researchers and enthusiasts. Now, thanks to the Santa Barbara Web site and the efforts of a small group of scholars, collectors and independent record labels, acoustic-era popular music is drifting back into earshot, one crackly cylinder and 78 r.p.m. disc at a time. These old records hold pleasant surprises, but they also carry a larger lesson about gaping holes in the story of American pop.
glass
urban glass house