i always wondered what he thought about jerry,and why they seemed to have no relationship at all. i could be wrong,but i can never find information about the two of them interacting. i realize larry left home at a young age,but you would think there would be SOME kind of relationship. ---------- www.shakeylee.com
Adler is untouchable as a musician, period. I have watched hours of videos of him playing complex classical pieces and a vast repertoire of Gershwin and have yet, I think, to hear anyone who comes close to his level of techique, execution and feeling. He was my kind of guy in that he refused to testify in front of the Joe McCarthy witching hunting hearings in that insane search for Hollywood communists and exiled himself to Europe for years where he dazzled audiences with his playing. He would not rat out his friends. There was no false modesty in him, I think, and he had no love of blues harmonica players, or diatonic harmonica in general.He did admire Sonny Terry, though. There was another thread back in 2012 about Adler where Iceman posted a brief bit about meeting him some years back; the anecdote confirms Adler's dislike of non-chromatic harmonica. I reprint it here; I hope you don't mind, Larry.
"It was no secret that Larry Adler did not like the sound or the players of what he called "the short harp" (except for Sonny Terry).
I had lunch with him in Trossingen during one of the World Competitions in the 90's. It was interesting to me how everyone totally avoided him that few days, especially out in public - either intimidated or scared to talk with him.
He was sitting alone at his table when I introduced myself and asked if it would be OK to join him. He was pretty nice, does not think much of the USA because of the McCarthy Era Red Scare, which caused him to leave the country.
Later on, after my diatonic competition piece, a lot of attendees almost fell over when he came up to me, shook my hand and told me he enjoyed the sound of my "short harp". I guess this was pretty rare." ---Iceman, 12/2/2012, MBH Forum. " ---------- Ted Burke __________________ ted-burke.com tburke4@san.rr.com
Larry was a beast!!! He most definitely was a big influence on George Smith and George himself has said that on a number of interviews over the years. Larry had enormous respect for Sonny Terry because of the wide variety of tonal colors Sonny would get just by the way he used his hands alone and that's something too many diatonic players tend to not learn how to use properly for both acoustic as well as amplified harp.
I saw him on the old Johnny Carson Tonight Show in the very early 80's doing a classical music piece called The Flight Of The Bumble Bee, which if you were into the old TV shows from the 60's, was the theme used in the old Green Hornet TV series that was absolutely a total jaw dropper. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
I was lucky and got to see Larry Adler in Baltimore in 1998, playing with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which was then being conducted by Marvin Hamlisch for that particular series of programs. This was maybe two years before Mr. Adler died. He looked ancient, and I would guess his suit had not been pressed since sometime back in the Disco era. Yet when he spoke he was sharp as a tack, and his playing was unbelievably beautiful. I felt so lucky to have a chance to see him.
Here is a link to a preview/review of the show from the Baltimore newspaper, which has some quotes from Mr. Adler. He was a pistol.
I was at a friend's house for dinner a few years ago, and they had another couple over. Our host mentioned that I play harmonica, and the other guy said "My uncle was a harmonica player. Supposed to be the greatest player ever. But he had to leave the country during the McCarthy era."
Yikes! I literally got a chill and asked him if his uncle was Larry Adler? He couldn't believe that I had heard of him. Adler was his mother's brother. I asked him if he had met him and he said no, his mother didn't like him much because "he was a communist."
There´s no questioning Adler´s proficiency and influence, but liking it is not mandatory. The amount of "flamboyance", I think Brendan P called it, in his playing is tiresome.
I found nothing tiresome in Adler's technique nor execution. He was in the tradition of concert hall soloists who performed their complex repertoire with a relish only an an extreme level of proficiency avails them. Meaning, of course, that his skill and execution was appropriate to the body of work he interpreted. What I found tiresome in Adler's performance was his physicality,his manner. We've discussed elsewhere why harmonica players have a hard time making their performances visually compelling to large audiences; from even a few rows back, the players who move about constantly, wave their arms or do out sized hand gestures look odd, even silly. Adler, I guess,had the same issue and tried to be the showman. Showman he was, though, but for all those hours watching him on video I had wished he was more subdued and less melodramatic in his appearance. Liberace or Oscar Levant could make those melodramatic hand flourishes work in terms of something to see, but Adler I found looked just a little absurd, a reed thin virtuoso bouncing , weaving, twisting about as he played , looking as though he were in a game of dodge ball. ---------- Ted Burke __________________ ted-burke.com tburke4@san.rr.com
Perhaps this is true, but on record he can't be beat. I have this Audio Fidelity vinyl album "a Study in High Fidelity" sound, where he plays standards with a quartet. It's gorgeous. He has the fattest chromatic tone I've ever heard. For me, his legacy is in the recordings. I agree with Ted Burke's comment above: as a musician he is 'untouchable'. jim Fitting
Seems to be a lot of mystique and mystery surrounding Larry Adler.
When I met him in Trossingen, everyone was avoiding him for some reason. Sitting and chatting with him, he seemed happy that someone had crossed that invisible line.
At that time I was not well schooled in how famous he was, so treated him like a nice old gentleman who seemed to be a little lonely and told him so.
He seemed to enjoy our interaction and, as restated above, shook my hand after my performance piece and mentioned how he really liked the sound I got from the "short harp".
btw, my approach is very different, as I have always focused on the beautiful sound of a vibrating reed and do not sound like most "short harp" players.
(Joe Filisko snapped a photo of the two Larrys sitting at that lunch table conversing...if I can find it, will try to scan and upload it). ---------- The Iceman
Last Edited by The Iceman on Mar 12, 2015 7:59 AM
"btw, my approach is very different, as I have always focused on the beautiful sound of a vibrating reed and do not sound like most "short harp" players."
My preferred sound is no distortion/amp. Clean through a PA, either in front of mic or cupping w/out wah wah or Chicago ballsy sound.
Have tried to find the most efficient amount of breathing air pressure to allow the reed to give everything it has before starting to stress it in any way, resulting in a beautiful sound of a vibrating reed.
Decent examples can be found in the previously posted "Summertime" and Winslow's Bunch O' Guys video clips in other threads here.
Then, have spent the last four years learning TB/crunch/bluesier sounds.
Can do either depending on the situation, but prefer my own original voice and sound. Sometimes will sit in w/blues band and use the clean note approach to great effect and also to the pleased surprise of the listeners. ---------- The Iceman
Last Edited by The Iceman on Mar 12, 2015 9:01 AM
^ I like the dirtier Blues sound, but in my practising, I like to get the cleanest notes I can. I want to play dirty at times because I WANT to, not because I can't control the notes any better.
---------- My YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ2_8CnjaiNLcPke4gWQ65A
Here's an amazing version of "Summertime." Eleven people voted thumbs-down. Larry Adler and Itzhak Perlman. "Naaaaaah, they can't play for shit!" YouTube never ceases to amaze me.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Mar 14, 2015 9:04 AM
I saw Larry in the 80's, he was guest conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony. Of course he played a few tunes himself. I always heard he detested the diatonic and considered it a toy. He made a lot f movies, pretty well known, similar to Hoagy Carmichael, who also made a number of movies. Larry usually played himself though, Hoagy didn't always.
Wow, he definitely seemed to loath the diatonic. I wonder if he secretly sucked(no pun intended) at it. Not sure why he would dislike it so much,unless he felt that the genuine authenticity of those who played it lacked real musical ability?
Maybe he hated it because its ascendance with the blues, rock (and blues rock), and country music (Charlie McCoy) coincided with the period when his own popularity as a performer started falling off.
Or maybe he associated it with Americana of a certain sort, rather than "high class" classical, and maybe his bad experience with Red Baiting left him soured on America.
My mother (b. 1928) used to say, "Oh, he's corny" when I'd mention Adler. My mother! That turned me off on him for a long time. But watching clips on YouTube this morning made me realize just what a heavyweight he is.
Larry Adler enjoyed the ability to produce any chromatic tone in the scale as a stand alone beautiful entity and played MUSIC.
I would venture to guess that he found the "short harp" to be limited in this aspect and didn't enjoy the sound of notes slipping sharp/flat as is so often the case with diatonic, as well as the limitation of certain notes just not being there.
Most diatonic players play with that "harmonicky" sound, well suited toward one style of music for the most part, but falling short of the full spectrum.
The fact that he actually enjoyed the diatonic playing of a few over the years is a compliment to those that had a more individual and unique sound/approach to the "short harp" that suited his advanced sensibilities. ---------- The Iceman
He came up as a teenager in vaudeville, playing with no amplification and making his 3-minute pitch while following or being followed by dancing bears, acrobats, jugglers, torch singers, and burlesque acts. So he really did have to be a showman to put himself across. Hence the emphatic body language and showy use of hands.
He had a manner which was aloof at a middle distance but warm close up. He had the knack of being charming and personable even while being nearly impersonal. He came from an era when such social skills were important, especially when you came from a working class background from which your talent and ambition drove you to escape and people put on airs to distinguish themselves. For a plumber's son from Baltimore, this was part of his road up.
As a youth, Adler was both talented and undisciplined. But he always had high standards. He succeeding in hobnobbing with the likes of composers George Gershwin and Maurice Ravel, mobster Al Capone, and movie stars Bob Hope and Ingrid Bergman. Anyone with both ambition and standard that aimed that high is unlikely to have been tolerant of what he saw as lesser lights. And of course with the ego that comes with that territory, naturally he saw himself as the best and would only admit of very few coming close. He counted Sonny Terry as the only blues harmonica player that he felt exhibited that standard of excellence and Toots Thielemans as the only jazz player.
That said, he was not always ruthless in judging other harmonica players. I remember a conversation with him regarding Tommy Reilly, the other great classical harmonica player of his generation active at that time, and the fact that Reilly had supposedly not come to the world harmonica festival that year to avoid clashing with Adler. Adler shook his head a little ruefully, and indicated that he didn't feel that way about Tommy.
As to seeing the diatonic as an inferior instrument, Adler belonged to his time and class. Remember that he was born in the era of progress. Old, simple, and organic were to be tossed out in favor of new, gleaming, manufactured and complex. Why tolerate a harmonica that didn't even play all the notes of a single scale when you could have one that could play any melody in any key, any style without having to work around missing notes. This attitude prevailed in the harmonica community inhabited by northern, middle class players until at least the 1970s. They were flummoxed when their kids started squawking away on diatonic harmonicas and playing all the folk music with dirt on its roots that they'd been trying to leave behind along with outhouses, wood stoves, and unpaved roads.
For similar reasons, Adler counseled beginning players in printed advice to avoid doing things like train imitations. While he didn't elaborate, I suspect that he'd heard so much bad playing that centered around "stupid harmonica tricks" (not his term) that he was fed up with people trying to do something other than use the instrument as a tool to make good music. As Iceman's story shows, when Adler heard good playing, he responded positively. (Incidentally, I remember Jerry Murad having the same attitude. I remember having breakfast with Joe Filisko at a SPAH convention and Jerry made a point of coming up and complimenting Joe on his tone.) =========== Winslow
