Larry Adler; Virtuoso Raised Harmonica to ‘Concert Status’

When Billie Holiday, the legendary singer, heard Larry Adler play the harmonica, she marveled, “Man, you don’t play that thing, you sing it.”

Adler, a slight man with a brassy personality, did not argue. Nor would a host of top names in music, from George Gershwin to Maurice Ravel, who raved about his prodigious talent for producing the lush sounds of a full orchestra from the humble harmonica.

“Singing the instrument is exactly what I try to do,” Adler once told the New York Times.

“I come from a generation to whom melody meant everything. I try to make as smooth a melodic line as I can while trying as much as possible to approximate the human voice. It’s the same thing Miles Davis does on the trumpet and Bill Evans did on the piano.”

Adler, who died Tuesday at 87 in a London hospital, was called the world’s greatest harmonica player. He was, according to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, “the first harmonica player to achieve recognition and acceptance in classical musical circles and to have elevated the instrument to concert status.”

He reached the height of his popularity in the United States in the 1930s and ‘40s, when he played with Duke Ellington and toured with Jack Benny. Important composers, including Darius Milhaud, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold and Joaquin Rodrigo, wrote music for him. Ravel was so enraptured by Adler’s interpretation of his “Bolero” that he placed a provision in his will allowing the harmonica player to perform it without paying royalties.

A gifted raconteur who hobnobbed with royals, mobsters and celebrities, Adler loved to boast of winning a name-dropping contest with Walter Cronkite.

He also was a vocal progressive, which got him into trouble during the McCarthy era. Spurning a subpoena to name names before the Communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949, he made England his home, becoming one of its beloved entertainers, a popular writer and a talk show fixture.

How all this happened to the son of a Baltimore plumber is a question for which Adler had a ready reply: “I couldn’t wait to get out of Baltimore.”

His parents were Russian Orthodox Jews, but religion was not the only reason Adler stood apart. At 5 he was mesmerized by Rachmaninoff at a Baltimore concert, but he also loved Al Jolson. He took up piano and at age 8 was enrolled at Baltimore’s Peabody School of Music. At his first recital at the conservatory, the teacher asked, “And what are we going to play, my little man?” Repulsed by the thought of being anyone’s little man, Adler tossed aside his scheduled piece, Grieg’s “Waltz in A Minor,” and banged out “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” He was expelled.

When he was 14, he saw a notice in the Baltimore Evening Sun about a harmonica contest. Having earlier talked a music store owner into giving him a harmonica, he entered and won, playing Beethoven’s “Minuet in G.”

With his prize money, he bought a train ticket and ran away to New York, where he auditioned for Borrah Minevitch and his Harmonica Rascals, a fabled group. But Minevitch had three words for Adler: “Kid, you stink.”

Adler cried, but Minevitch’s opinion did not soften. So the dejected teenager left on a streetcar that passed by the Paramount Theatre. Seeing Rudy Vallee’s name on the marquee, he hopped off, sneaked past the doorman and talked his way into a spot in the suave crooner’s nightclub act. “And I flopped,” he said later, but Vallee helped him get other jobs, including playing accompaniment for Mickey Mouse cartoons.

Soon he made it to the vaudeville circuit as a mouth-organ prodigy who played classical music by ear. Still 14 and barely out of knickers, he signed his first contract for a princely $100 a week.

At 16 he was invited to play for band leader Paul Whiteman, who asked him to perform “Rhapsody in Blue.” Loath to admit that the Gershwin piece was too complex for him, Adler said, “I don’t like it.” Whiteman turned to the man next to him and said, “What do you think of that, George? This kid doesn’t like your ‘Rhapsody.’ ” That was how Adler met Gershwin.

Years later, Adler redeemed himself when a party host put him and Gershwin on the spot by asking them to play “Rhapsody” as a duet. When they finished the piece, the composer rose from the piano and placed a hand on Adler’s shoulder. “That . . . thing,” Gershwin said of his score, “sounds like it was written for you.”

It became a signature piece for Adler, whose convincing simulation of the clarinet solos and piano cadenzas led to a close bond with Gershwin. When the legendary composer died, his brother Ira gave Adler one of his unpublished scores to perform.

In the mid-1930s Adler became a phenomenon in London, playing duets with the Duke of Kent and attracting a 300,000-member fan club.

Back in the United States, he formed an act with tap dancer Paul Draper, “the Dancing Hamlet,” which became one of the highest-paid concert attractions in the country. As Draper danced, Adler performed concerts of Bach, Liszt and Vivaldi, as well as Jerome Kern and Gershwin. Adler played Carnegie Hall in 1943 and entertained troops with Jack Benny during World War II.

In 1947, a woman in Greenwich, Conn., tried to stop an Adler-Draper concert, claiming that they were pro-Communists who were sending their profits straight to Moscow. Adler and Draper sued her for libel. The case ended in a hung jury in 1950, but their careers in America were ruined.

Adler was on tour in Britain when he was notified of a summons from the House Un-American Activities Committee. His agent told him that unless he was willing to go before the committee and name Communists, he ought not come home.

Adler acknowledged belonging to many left-wing organizations but denied being a Communist, once explaining that he was too unorthodox to toe the line for any party. But naming names, he said, would have felt like a sin to him. Blacklisted, he chose to stay in England.

Shamed into formal music training by Ingrid Bergman, with whom he had an affair, he had learned to read notes by the early 1940s and eventually wrote 200 pieces. His works included the Oscar-nominated score for the 1953 film “Genevieve,” a popular British comedy, but because of his political incorrectness, he was uncredited for many years.

Twice married, Adler lived in a flat in Chalk Farm, near Camden, and had four children. In his last decades, he returned to the U.S. regularly to perform.

He won a younger generation of fans at age 80 through a 1994 album, “The Glory of Gershwin,” which featured duets with Elton John, Sinead O’Connor, Cher, Sting and other pop artists. He performed as recently as 1999.

“To me it’s a great joy to play,” he said a few years ago. “I don’t think there’s anything to compare with knowing you’re playing a piece of music you love and you’re playing it well. It’s better than sex.”