THE amiable Jean-Baptiste “Toots” Thielemans would have been 100 in April. He made it almost that far, still playing concerts within two years of his death in 2016 at the age of 94.

He lived through a long stretch of jazz history and helped make that history. Inspired by fellow Belgian Django Reinhardt, whom he counted as his most lasting and lyrical influence, Thielemans jammed with Charlie Parker, toured with Benny Goodman, was befriended by Louis Armstrong, gloried in countless concerts and recordings with a decades-spanning succession of luminaries.

He was a genius not just of invention but of adaptation. His first instrument was the accordion, and he took up a miniature version of it — the harmonica — after he heard the American virtuoso of the mouth organ, Larry Adler, play in films of the 1930s which he watched in a cinema in the same Brussels street where his parents ran a pub.