Harmonica's Return

All you have to do is move the left framiscle on the portisduble from hardistack with the muscles, using a frammisanic embouchure . . . Just practice this three times daily, but remember the fundamental rule: two stanistrings in the pedigrate of the bordistrich, but always with the left hand.

--Jazz Critic Leonard Feather

The dark, wispy little man with the high forehead and the doe-brown eyes raised his hands. Softly he blew into the instrument half-hidden between his palms. He could no more describe the magic than could his friend Feather, after seeing a similar performance almost 20 years ago. There was no need. Haunting as a train whistle at midnight, evocative as a gutbucket trumpet, as clean as a bank of violins, the music made by Harmonicist Larry Adler, 45, transformed the tawdry basement nightclub. For a little while last week, the bandstand at San Francisco's "hungry i" nightclub seemed as big as a concert stage.

After six years of life in England, the Baltimore kid had come home to play Gershwin, Debussy and Bach, Rachmaninoff, Ravel and Ellington. Whatever the piece, the pleasure of his fans was the measure of his welcome.

Old Times & Bad Times. When Larry Adler left the U.S. in 1953. he seemed finished. Once he had earned as much as $200,000 a year with his harmonica; suddenly he was ignored by employers who could not stand his noisy political ways, almost broke from prosecuting an inconclusive libel suit against a charge that he was a Communist. But when he finally came back, a four-week engagement at Greenwich Village's Village Gate stretched on to ten. And all of a sudden it was good-money times again.

Politics was not the only problem that ever bothered Larry Adler. For a long time there was the matter of talent. The son of a Baltimore plumber, he was tossed out of the Peabody School of Music in short order. Diagnosis: a tin ear. He was 13 when he read that the Baltimore Sun was sponsoring a harmonica contest. He spent three weeks teaching himself to play, won, and wasted little time heading for New York.

Mamma pleaded: "Larry, be a doctor. Be a lawyer. Be somebody." But Larry looked up the leader of a harmonica troupe. One audition and he got the word: "You stink." A few weeks later he was signed on for a tour of the Paramount vaudeville circuit--then the boss of the show came to rehearsal. The voice rumbled across the theater: "This boy stinks." In retrospect, says Adler, "there seems to have been a certain unhappy unanimity of feeling about me."

For a long while show business was tough indeed. Larry was in Chicago looking for work when he read a Variety ad: Sid Grauman was casting in Hollywood. A wire went out to Grauman: THE WORLD'S GREATEST HARMONICA PLAYER IS AT THE CHICAGO THEATER. The Wire Was signed "Louie Lipstone," the name of the head man at the Chicago Theater. Next morning, mildly conscience-stricken, Adler went around to explain. He walked in on a telephone conversation. "But I didn't send you a wire!" Lipstone was shouting. Then he saw the harmonica player. He covered the mouthpiece and asked: "Did you, you little bastard?" Adler nodded. Lipstone turned to the phone. "Yeah, that's right," he said. "The kid's great."

Dempsey & Duchin. By 1933, Har-onicist Adler had begun to catch on, and next year he went to England. Despite a mixed reception from the critics, he was a box-office smash. He married Eileen Walser, a London model, and began to tour the world. He was away so long that when he decided to come home in 1939, no one remembered him. "I was offered a job," he recalls ruefully, "in Jack Dempsey's bar." Then an appearance with Eddy Duchin got him started again. When World War II started, he traveled the world once more, entertaining troops. After that he settled in Hollywood and into its pinko parlor politics.

It was in 1948 when a Greenwich, Conn, housewife objected to his appearance in her town. Eventually Adler went back to England. Vaughan Williams wrote a piece for him; so did Darius Milhaud and Cyril Scott and Arthur Benjamin. In time, U.S. producers asked him to return. Now recording contracts are waiting along with nightclub engagements. "I'd like to alternate between the U.S. and the rest of the world," he says, but there is no doubt that recognition at home is what pleases him most. "I played part of Porgy recently," he recalls, "and a member of the cast told me, 'You don't play it; you sing it.' That," says Adler, "is what every musician is trying to do."

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