NEA Jazz Master, Toots Thielemans, is widely considered to be the preeminent jazz harmonica player - It is safe to say that before him, the harmonica in jazz was simply not done, and Thielemans can be credited with legitimizing the instrument in the genre. Born in Brussels, Belgium in 1922. Theileman's excelled on accordion as a small child, before picking up the guitar as a teenager after hearing Django Reinhart. Along the way, he taught himself to play harmonica as a hobby. In 1948, during a visit to the US, he sat in on guitar with a jazz group at small club in New York and was "discovered."

One of the first Broadway musical scores to be overtly jazz-influenced was Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story", a tale of rival street gangs in the inner city. In 1962, pianist Oscar Peterson put his light-swing signature on the already popular score, making it, in the words of one critic, 'a delight to hear again' and earning him a Grammy nomination.