The closing theme of Sesame Street, the whistling in Old Spice commercials, jam sessions with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, and the guitar that convinced a young John Lennon to play a Rickenbacker all trace back to one man: Jean-Baptiste Frederic Isidore Toots Thielemans. This episode follows the Brussels cafe owner's son who played a cardboard accordion at three, entered college as a mathematics major, and taught himself guitar by ear from Django Reinhardt records during the German occupation of Belgium. When American bebop records flooded Europe after 1945, he abandoned his degree entirely.

The hosts recount how a Benny Goodman agent heard him in a New York club in 1948, how the Goodman European tour turned out to be his first paid gig, and how British Musicians Union rules at the London Palladium barred his guitar but not the harmonica ...