Yesterday & Today

This 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. Producers Cees Schrama, a personalfriend, 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. 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. Thielemans, nowadays, is almost universally loved as a harmonica-star. It took a while, though, before he became a household name.