Concert serves as a salute to Toots
Jazzman returns to harmonica in quartet saluting Belgian master who ‘played with heart’
At the next concert, Normand Glaude, who is something of a renaissance man in Ottawa’s jazz community, will make an overdue return to his first musical love — the harmonica.
Glaude, 48, is arguably best known for either playing bass or for running his Morning Anthem recording studio out of his home in Cumberland. Meanwhile, his profile as a vocalist is also rising. In the Capital Voices quartet, Glaude sings bass.
If all of these musical pursuits didn’t keep Glaude busy enough, he’s also a software consultant, in keeping with his University of Ottawa engineering degree and work history at Performance Technologies (now part of Genband) and Bridgewater Systems (now part of Amdocs). However, these days, Glaude wants to mark playing the chromatic harmonica, which was in fact his first instrument when the Orléans native was growing up.
For that ambition, Glaude has a hero who looms large — the late Belgian harmonica master Jean-Baptiste “Toots” Thielemans, who played with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius, and even played on the theme song
for the Sesame Street TV show. Thielemans played at the 2007 TD Ottawa Jazz Festival, retired in 2014 and died in 2016 at the age of 94. Glaude gives his first concert solely on harmonica, and his first concert as a leader, on Friday at GigSpace when he’ll be at the helm of a quartet that will pay tribute to Thielemans.
Q: Tell me how you pulled together your various musical skills.
A: The funny thing is that bass was not my first instrument, harmonica was. It’s only at around 16 years of age that I took up the electric bass — really the last instrument I tried as a kid. I dabbled on the piano, sang in the church choir for many years, played alto sax (I even have a recording of that on a 45 — the prize for a songwriting contest I won as a teenager).
I remember being four or five and playing reels on the diatonic harmonica with my father. He played them rather well. I believe I was eight when he gave me my first chromatic harmonica. We had a few eight-track tapes of various popular tunes on harmonica that I used to listen to.
I took violin lessons as a kid for a couple of years, the Suzuki method, and that was mostly it. I took sporadic private lessons here and there, including two or three on jazz theory, but outside of this, I am mostly self-taught when it comes to jazz. There are so many great resources out there for analytical minds like mine fuelled by curiosity.
Q: What’s responsible for your return to harmonica?
A: When I started playing bass, the harmonicas went back into the drawer. As an artist, I wanted to develop my voice, and spent a fair amount of effort getting my bass chops going, but I found it difficult to get a public following.
Then I discovered Toots Thielemans. Wow — a sound that speaks. And an instrument for which I had some affinity as a kid. I cleaned my old chromatic harmonica and tried to re-learn a few tunes. But the real awakening was when (Ottawa guitarist) Tim Bedner approached me to record his solo album Of Light and Shadow. There was this one song that I thought would sit nice on the harmonica. I secretly learned the head (melody) and played it for Tim, offering to do just this one tune. Little did I know, Tim was a big Toots fan, and asked me to play harmonica on the whole album. I wasn’t ready for that, but couldn’t turn him down, so I got to work.
Q: Why do so few people play jazz harmonica?
A: Well, I think it’s twofold. Most of today’s jazz musicians start off playing their instrument in school — and simply, there is no harmonica in school bands. There is little written music for it, and it’s not loud enough to compete with the other wind instruments. The second reason is that I believe it is a really hard instrument to play. It has a shrill sound that is hard to tame, the breathing pattern is non-intuitive and changes with every key. Bebop lines are really hard to learn. I still can’t play them very well.
Q : What does Toots Thielemans’ example mean to you?
A: Toots Thielemans plays with his heart. We think of Toots as the harmonica player with all the juicy notes, but I think it was all in his heart. Onstage or in interview, when you see Toots, you see simplicity, honesty and generosity. He had so much kindness to offer, and that was reflected in his music.