Toots Thielemans Quartet

Toots Thielemans (harmonica), Hans Van Oosterhout (drums), Hein Van de Geyn (bass), Karel Boehlee (piano)

He might be 88 years old, but Toots Thielemans keeps on wowing concert-goers. As godfather of Jazz Middelheim, his name can’t be absent at ‘his’ festival.

Toots Thielemans (1922) made the harmonica a fully fledged solo instrument and developed an extremely expressive and appealing style. This has led him to being voted, year after year, ‘best instrumentalist’ in the category ‘miscellaneous instruments’, by both the readers and reviewers of Down Beat, the leading American jazz and blues magazine. Toots carries on performing and travelling, albeit at a slightly slower tempo than before. This year he’s already played in New York and Cape Town, where sadly his faithful manager, Dirk Godts, unexpectedly died.

Toots Thielemans is still very present in the media, through writing soundtracks for TV series such as Baantjer and Witse. His story is part of our collective heritage. The ‘local lad’ from the Marollen district in Brussels who conquered the world. At 17, influenced by Larry Adler, he started playing harmonica. A few years later he picked up the guitar, this time inspired by Django Reinhardt. The rest is history. In 1952, Toots decided to try his chances in the States, where he soon made a name for himself as well as playing with the great names in jazz from Charlie Parker and Miles Davis to George Shearing, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald. He still holds to his life’s motto, 'Between a smile and a tear'.

Nowadays, his composition Bluesette has basically become a national anthem.. He takes to the Jazz Middelheim stage with Hein Van de Geyn, Karel Boehlee and Hans Van Oosterhout, who had played in place of Danilo Perez at last year’s edition due to Danilo’s injury. In the meantime the repertoire has been finalized. Toots will release a live album with this same quartet in September.