Renowned worldwide as a harmonica virtuoso, Larry Adler brought jazz and European classical music to the instrument in ways that earned it far greater respect and visibility than it had previously known. Born Lawrence Cecil Adler on February 10, 1914, in Baltimore to Russian Jewish immigrants who had altered the family name from Zelakovitch, he counted Al Jolson among his earliest idols on stage while also admiring comedian George Jessel and serving as a sidekick to Eddie Cantor, whose looks he shared. Professional work as a mouth organist commenced at age fourteen when he captured first place in a statewide competition by playing a shortened arrangement of Beethoven’s Minuet in G. Shortly afterward he astonished his parents by heading to New York City on his own.
Following a brief stint as an intermission act for Rudy Vallée, he persuaded bandleader Paul Ash to obtain him a one-hundred-dollar weekly engagement with a touring variety revue that performed between film screenings in Paramount theaters. His entry into cinema came through synchronizing a harmonica solo to the soundtrack of an early animated sound cartoon. In 1929 he recorded alongside vocalist Ruth Etting and joined her, Gus Edwards, and tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson at Broadway’s Palace Theater; two years later he appeared with Fred and Adele Astaire in Flo Ziegfeld’s production Smiles.
Maurice Ravel’s Bolero proved decisive for Adler’s trajectory. He first presented it at the Blackhawk in San Francisco using Hal Kemp’s dance-band arrangement, then performed the piece again as part of a prologue to Eddie Cantor’s film Roman Scandals at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Unfamiliar with the written time signature and convinced the orchestra was dragging, he improvised freely while gesturing with his free arm as though “chopping an invisible tree.” The flamboyant display, which he would later term “corny Sturm und Drang,” ignited the audience and brought him instant prominence. He soon became a visible figure in Hollywood social circles, appearing in the 1934 film Many Happy Returns alongside Ray Milland, Burns & Allen, and Duke Ellington, and submitting to heavy “Chinese” makeup for a sequence in Busby Berkeley’s The Singing Marine. He played duets with George Gershwin, whose “Rhapsody in Blue” entered his regular repertoire along with mouth-organ transcriptions of violin concerti by Antonio Vivaldi and J.S. Bach and original works written for him by Malcolm Arnold, Arthur Benjamin, Jean Berger, Darius Milhaud, Cyril Scott, Graham Whettam, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
His jazz explorations included 1938 recordings with Gypsy swing guitarist Django Reinhardt. Reflecting on such partnerships, Adler later wrote: “If I work with an Ellington, a Django, a Bill Evans, a Dizzy Gillespie, I play at the top of my form or even beyond it. I know that I could not duplicate the solos I recorded with Django Reinhardt, because there is no longer a Django to inspire me.” During World War II he performed across the globe, frequently alongside comedian Jack Benny, and once secured an emergency supply of harmonicas from the newly liberated Hohner factory in Trossingen in the Black Forest. An outspoken critic of “any dogma that puts the mind in blinkers and forbids the free discussion of ideas,” Adler found himself blacklisted amid Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations; as a result his Academy Award-nominated score for the film Genevieve was credited instead to studio conductor Muir Mathieson. In striking counterpoint to that slight, he became the first American recipient of the Grand Prix du Disque for his recording of “Le Grisbi,” the theme from the French gangster film Touchez-pas au Grisbi starring Jean Gabin. He collaborated with leading conductors worldwide and identified the “musical high point” of his life as a 1952 appearance at the Royal Albert Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Malcolm Sargent.
Adler resided primarily in the United Kingdom for the latter half of his life. He was featured with violinist Itzhak Perlman in a 1981 telecast duet of “Summertime,” contributed to Sting’s album Ten Summoner’s Tales, and accompanied vocalist Kate Bush on a 1994 version of “The Man I Love” for his final major undertaking, the all-star tribute album The Glory of Gershwin. He died in London on August 7, 2001, at the age of eighty-seven. His autobiography, It Ain’t Necessarily So, contains both historic observations and the candid, humorous directness that defined his character.
