Tommy Reilly

Tommy Reilly is the harmonica’s great crossover virtuoso. Born in Canada and raised partly on the instrument thanks to his father’s harmonica band, he moved to England with his family in 1935 and was studying violin in Leipzig when the outbreak of WWII interrupted his classical training and redirected his career onto the harmonica instead.

What followed was an unusually serious concert career for the instrument: roughly thirty composers wrote pieces specifically for him, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold and Gordon Jacob, and he was a valued soloist with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Alongside his concert work he became a favoured session player for film composers — Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein and Dimitri Tiomkin all wrote for him, and his playing is the sound most collectors associate with the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack.

He also worked prolifically, and fairly anonymously, on library music and light orchestral sessions under pseudonyms including “Dwight Barker,” often alongside fellow harmonica player James Moody — a detail that makes his rarer library-music pressings a genuinely obscure corner for a specialist collector to dig through, distinct from his better-known concert and soundtrack work.