Midnight Cowboy's jazz harmonica - Asides (III)
Watching Midnight Cowboy on the big screen brought Toots Thielemans' wonderful harmonica theme into sonic focus. Like a lot of people, I suspect, Harry Nilsson's timeless cover of Fred Neil's 'Everybody's Talkin' is the first thing that comes to mind when we think of the soundtrack to that film. Yet the lazy drawl of Thielemans' harmonica is the symbolic glue that holds Joe Buck and Rizzo's peculiar friendship together. It conjures up a childlike naivety and an understated melancholy, softening the edges of the brutality of New York and the desperate and unpredictable turns that adulthood can take.
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| "Hey, I'm walkin here, I'm walkin here!" |
Compare the light touch of his playing - almost a soft kiss - to the harshness of Bob Dylan's - I'm not knocking Bob by the way. In fact, I think it's made me fall a little bit in love with an instrument whose use, rather like the saxophone, I've often considered lazy and unnecessary.
This morning I'm listening and learning all about Toots. I've always loved the gorgeous harmonica in the Sesame Street theme tune, particularly that slowed down coda, kicking in, as the camera pans down the set at the close of the intro. I'll often find myself humming/mouthing it of a morning as I start to move. Apparently this is Toots. That I can also add him to an ever growing list of famous Belgians will also help with that tiresome question 'Name a famous Belgian other than Hercule Poirot?'
As for the film, reissued for its 50th anniversary, it has now begun to take on a striking period detail. Like the London of Hitchcock's Frenzy, this New York is long gone. Manhattan looks hellish. Amongst that hell there are lovely episodes, though, particularly the melancholic shoeshine scene with Rizzo remembering his father. And for the second time this month I was struck by connections to Withnail and I. Tom Burke's performance in Joanna Hogg's fantastic Souvenir - which I write about here - owes much to Richard E Grant's Withnail. But here I found myself thinking of the debt that Withnail and I, in its depiction of a difficult and short-lived male friendship, owes to Midnight Cowboy.
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| Toots Thielemans - a better harmonica player than Eden Hazard |
As for the film, reissued for its 50th anniversary, it has now begun to take on a striking period detail. Like the London of Hitchcock's Frenzy, this New York is long gone. Manhattan looks hellish. Amongst that hell there are lovely episodes, though, particularly the melancholic shoeshine scene with Rizzo remembering his father. And for the second time this month I was struck by connections to Withnail and I. Tom Burke's performance in Joanna Hogg's fantastic Souvenir - which I write about here - owes much to Richard E Grant's Withnail. But here I found myself thinking of the debt that Withnail and I, in its depiction of a difficult and short-lived male friendship, owes to Midnight Cowboy.
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