Singular, Artistic Lives: Toots Thielemans, Steven Hill

People are singular and characteristic , their lives are transformative, they go round and round, start somewhere and end up somewhere else and in the somewhere in between they achieve what becomes how we remember them.

Take Jean-Baptiste Frederic Isidor Baron Thielemans, who was born in Brussels, part of a post-World War I Europe where exuberant and fresh hints of jazz and blues began to ripple across the ocean from America. He had a gift and a heart for music right way, taking up a homemade at the age of three. He discovered jazz, while the Germans were occupying Belgium during World War II. He was then playing an accordion, a big, bulky instrument and the harmonica, a small, tricky and bottomless little thing.  Then, he heard Django Reinhardt, Belgium-born but an ethnic Romanian and gypsy, play jazz guitar and started to play guitar, too. Reinhardt, charismatic, swingy, touched Thielemans: “He can make me cry when I hear him.”  Oh, and he could also whistle.

The die was cast for him. By 1949, he was sitting in on a jam session in Paris with Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Max Roach — some jazz session that.  It set him on a road to the United States, to where he moved in 1952 and became a part of the king of be-bop Charlie Parker’s All Stars. Which found him becoming: The man who made a magic, sweet and free instrument out of the harmonica as Toots Thielemans.

Consider the man who started out in life as one Solomon Krakovsky, who was born on February 24, 1922, in Seattle, Washington, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and who grew up and out after a stint in at the University of Washington and the U.S. Naval Reserve. He wanted to be an actor and moved to New York, where studied and got parts on the stage in New York as an actor named Steven Hill. In 1946, he made his first Broadway appearance in “A Flag is Born” by Ben Hecht, which was directed by the legendary Joshua Logan. The director liked what he saw and cast Hill in the small role of a hapless sailor named Stefanowski in “Mister Roberts,” a hit from the get go. He would also be one of the newly minted class called the Actors Studio, headed by Lee Strasberg, a class that included Julie Harris, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando.  Strasberg called Hill, who had dark-haired, cragged good looks, “one of the finest actors America has ever produced.”

His career was launched, with intermittent hits and misses on stage, in films and in television, especially the early-day live drama shows of the 1950s.   After an abortive stint on the old “Mission Impossible” series, he stopped acting for ten years.  By the time he returned to acting — “they say you can’t quit show biz,” Hill said — he was an older version of himself, He looked and acted with authority and as authority.

In 1990, Solomon Krokovsky-Steven Hill became Adam Schiff, an altogether memorable part of the evolving ensemble and hit television series, “Law and Order,” which spawned several other long-running and always running series, including “Law and Order SVU.”

Playing Schiff the sometimes sour, sometimes eloquent district attorney on the show, Hill become immortal in the fashion that only television can bestow by way of eternal reruns, and by his unique abilities which seemed to show themselves in what were always mini-lessons in effective, powerful acting. In the process, he became a part of the lore of “Law and Order.”

Toots Thielemans and Steven Hill were born in the same year: 1922, April 29, and Feb. 24, respectively, and died within a day of each other at 94 in the month of August 2016 — Aug. 22 and Aug. 23.  They sported and shared unique gifts of creative originality.

Thielemans could and almost did play with everybody. While he played with jazz legends and greats like Parker, Miles Davis and others, he could and did venture into the spritely areas of pop, and loved working with vocalists, from whom he elicited admiration and versatility.  His harmonica, small and all, made mighty, brilliant, and energetic sounds that could wrap themselves with great longing around a love song and fly with the highest of improvisational geniuses like Parker and Davis. All at once, he could seduce and bop and be wholly himself.

A number of years ago, I ran across an album on the Verve label, which featured a cover tinged in blue with a photo of a man in dark glasses and with a white mustache, hands covering a harmonica. It was called “One More for the Road,” a whole album of songs by the legendary Harold Arlen with an array of gifted vocalists, and Thielemans on harmonica.  I’d never heard of him, truth be told, but I haven’t forgotten him now.  The songs — “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” with Madeleine Peyroux, “One for My Baby,”  “I Got a Right to Sing the Blues” with Beth Hart on vocals and more — are hard-core and focused with Thielmans’s playing pulling out emotions like a miner for a heart of gold.

I play the album often — and found opportunity to re-discover Thielemans on YouTube which everybody should do. Trumpeter Clarence Brown once said: “Toots, the way you play the harmonica, they should not call it a miscellaneous instrument.”

In that long birth-name, there is a referenced royalty, he is Baron Thielemans.  But, goodness knows, he is Toots. His face, when he’s playing alone or with the likes of Peggy Leg, is a map of the contours of delight.

Hill’s face had a different definition, especially as Adam Schiff.  He played Schiff — a man balancing morality, the needs of justice, and the pull of politics — like a Talmudic scholar, always trying to find the place where a cop, an attorney, 12 jurors and victims could do their dramatic dance but maintain a moral balance.

Others had the job later, after Hill’s ten years as Schiff, including famously, the late, former senator and presidential candidate Fred Thompson. It was Hill who proved to be a clipped, incandescent figure of authority, a pragmatist with a wounded soul.  He often had the last word on most episodes, but nothing is more memorable then when he confronted the impending death of his wife with a stifled sob.

Even now, we think of him solely as Schieff, Adam, from Steven Hill by way of sounding Solomon Krokovsky.