A “Self-Told” Musician: Toots Thielemans and the Many Challenges of the Jazzman’s Autobiographical Discourse

This paper addresses the autobiographical discourse of jazz musicians. After reviewing the main issues raised in academic literature, it delves into the example of Toots Thielemans (1922–2016) and shows how the twentieth-century media landscape enabled him to cultivate a romantic self-narrative, evolving in time and space, and instrumental in the constitution of a respectable and legitimate jazz musician persona. The paper then analyzes the issues involved in the process of fixing this self narrative in writing in Marc Danval’s biographical work Toots Thielemans, offering new insights on the collaboration between musicians and biographers.