Oscar Peterson

[Kent Swafford]

On Dec 25, 2007, at 5:40 PM, Hechler Family wrote:

> I listened to this all the way through.
>
> I never could get used to this form of jazz because WHERE THE HELL  
> IS THE MELODY ?

Contrasting views of Oscar Peterson's playing are nothing new. The New  
York Times deals with the issue well in its obituary.

Oscar Peterson was the greatest. My favorite record of his was a solo  
piano album from the 70's called "Tracks". If you happen to have  
iTunes, you can listen to the excerpt from "A Little Jazz Exercise",  
which still blows me away after 30 years.

http://tinyurl.com/3dcpv9

Kent Swafford



December 25, 2007
Oscar Peterson, 82, Jazz’s Piano Virtuoso, Dies
By RICHARD SEVERO
Oscar Peterson, whose dazzling piano playing made him one of the most  
popular jazz artists in history, died on Sunday night at his home in  
Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto. He was 82.

The cause was kidney failure, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation  
reported. Mr. Peterson had performed publicly for a time even after a  
stroke he suffered in 1993 compromised movement in his left hand.

Mr. Peterson was one of the greatest virtuosos in jazz, with a piano  
technique that was always meticulous and ornate and sometimes  
overwhelming. But rather than expand the boundaries of jazz, he used  
his gifts in the service of moderation and reliability, gratifying his  
devoted audiences whether he was playing in a trio or solo or  
accompanying some of the most famous names of jazz. His technical  
accomplishments were always evident, almost transparently so. Even at  
his peak, there was very little tension in his playing.

One of the most prolific major stars in jazz history, he amassed an  
enormous discography. From the 1950s until his death, he released  
sometimes four or five albums a year, toured Europe and Japan  
frequently and became a big draw at jazz festivals.

Norman Granz, his influential manager and producer, helped Mr.  
Peterson realize that success, setting loose a flow of records on his  
own Verve and Pablo labels and establishing Mr. Peterson as a favorite  
in his touring Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts in the 1940s and ’50s.

Mr. Peterson won eight Grammy awards, as well as almost every possible  
honor in the jazz world. He played alongside giants like Louis  
Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, Nat King Cole,  
Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald.

Duke Ellington referred to him as “maharajah of the keyboard.” Basie  
said, “Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I’ve ever heard.” The  
pianist and conductor André Previn called Mr. Peterson “the best”  
among jazz pianists.

In a review of a performance in 1987, Stephen Holden, writing in The  
New York Times, said, “Mr. Peterson’s rock-solid sense of swing,  
grounded in Count Basie, is balanced by a delicacy of tone and  
fleetness of touch that make his extended runs seem to almost  
disappear into the sky.” He added, “His amazing speed was matched by  
an equally amazing sense of thematic invention.”

But many critics found Mr. Peterson more derivative than original,  
especially early in his career. Some even suggested that his fantastic  
technique lacked coherence and was almost too much for some listeners  
to compute.

Billy Taylor, a fellow pianist and a jazz historian, said he thought  
that while Mr. Peterson was a “remarkable musician,” his “phenomenal  
facility sometimes gets in the way of people’s listening.”

Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 1966  
that Mr. Peterson’s playing “continues to be a pudding made of the  
leavings of Art Tatum, Nat Cole and Teddy Wilson.”

The critical ambivalence was typified in 1973 in a review of a  
Peterson performance by John S. Wilson of The Times. Mr. Wilson wrote:  
“For the last 20 years, Oscar Peterson has been one of the most  
dazzling exponents of the flying fingers school of piano playing. His  
performances have tended to be beautifully executed displays of  
technique but woefully weak on emotional projection.”

The complaints evoked those heard in the 1940s about the great concert  
violinist Jascha Heifetz, who was occasionally accused of being so  
technically brilliant that one could not find his or the composer’s  
heart and soul in the music he played.

The jazz critic Gene Lees defended Mr. Peterson as “a summational  
artist.”

“So was Mozart. So was Bach,” Mr. Lees wrote in his biography of Mr.  
Peterson, “The Will to Swing” (1990). “Bach and Mozart were both  
dealing with known vocabularies and an accepted body of aesthetic  
principles.” He noted that just as Bach used material that he first  
heard in Vivaldi, “Oscar uses a curious spinning figure that he got  
from Dizzy Gillespie.”

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was born in the poor St. Antoine district of  
Montreal on Aug. 15, 1925, one of five children of Daniel Peterson, a  
West Indian immigrant, and the former Olivia John, whom Daniel had met  
in Montreal. Daniel Peterson, who worked as a sleeping-car porter on  
the Canadian Pacific Railway, had taught himself how to play the organ  
before he landed in Halifax, N.S., in 1917. Mr. Peterson’s mother, who  
also had roots in the Caribbean, encouraged Oscar to study music.

As a boy, Oscar began to learn the trumpet as well as the piano. At 7,  
he contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized for 13 months. Fearing  
the strain the trumpet might put on his son’s lungs, Daniel Peterson  
persuaded him to concentrate on piano. He studied first with Lou  
Hooper, then with Paul (Alexander) de Marky, a Hungarian who had also  
given lessons to Oscar’s older sister, Daisy.

By his own account, Oscar believed he had become quite accomplished by  
age 14. Then he heard a recording by Art Tatum.

“I gave up the piano for two solid months,” Mr. Peterson later  
recalled, and had “crying fits at night” because he thought nobody  
else could ever be as good as Tatum.

The same year, however, he won an amateur competition sponsored by the  
CBC, prompting him to drop out of Montreal High School so he could  
spend all his time playing the piano.

By 1942, Oscar Peterson was known in Canada as the “Brown Bomber of  
Boogie-Woogie,” an allusion to the nickname of the boxer Joe Louis and  
also to Mr. Peterson’s physical stature — 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds.

Mr. Peterson became the only black member of the Johnny Holmes  
Orchestra, which toured Canada and the United States. In parts of the  
United States, he discovered that he, like other blacks, would not be  
served in the same hotels and restaurants as the white musicians. Many  
times they would bring food out to him as he sat in the band’s bus, he  
recalled.

For a time, Mr. Peterson was so identified with popular dance boogie- 
woogie that he was denied wider recognition as a serious jazz  
musician. In 1947, Mr. Granz, the jazz impresario, was on his way to  
Montreal’s airport in a taxi when he heard a live broadcast of Mr.  
Peterson playing at a local lounge. He ordered the driver to turn the  
taxi around and take him to the lounge. There he persuaded Mr.  
Peterson to move away from boogie-woogie.

Mr. Peterson eventually became a mainstay of the Jazz at the  
Philharmonic series, which Mr. Granz created in the 1940s. In 1949 Mr.  
Peterson made his debut at Carnegie Hall, becoming a sensation. A year  
later he won the Down Beat magazine readers’ poll for best jazz  
pianist for the first time. He would go on to win it more than a dozen  
times, the last in 1972.

Over the years his albums sold well, and he recorded with Billie  
Holiday, Fred Astaire, Benny Carter, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald,  
Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Buddy DeFranco and many others.  
He also occasionally sang.

Among his more notable long-playing recordings were the so-called Song  
Books of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern,  
Richard Rodgers, Harry Warren, Harold Arlen and Jimmy McHugh.

His format of choice was the trio. Perhaps his most famous threesome,  
which lasted from 1953 to 1958, was with the guitarist Herb Ellis and  
the bassist Ray Brown.

Though best known as an interpreter of other people’s work, Mr.  
Peterson cultivated a second identity as a composer. In 1964 he  
recorded “The Canadiana Suite,” an extended work written for his home  
country; he later wrote “African Suite” and “A Royal Wedding Suite,”  
for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.

Mr. Granz’s Verve and Pablo labels released most of Mr. Peterson’s  
work, but he also recorded for the MPS and Telarc labels, among others.

Mr. Peterson was frequently invited to perform for heads of state,  
including Queen Elizabeth II and President Richard M. Nixon. In 2005  
he became the first living person other than a reigning monarch to  
obtain a commemorative stamp in Canada, where streets, squares,  
concert halls and schools are named after him.

Mr. Peterson’s autobiography, “A Jazz Odyssey: The Life of Oscar  
Peterson,” was published in 2002 by Continuum.

According to the CBC, Mr. Peterson was married four times. He had a  
daughter, Celine, with his fourth wife, Kelly. He also had six  
children from his first and third marriages: Lyn, Sharon, Gay, Oscar  
Jr., Norman and Joel.

Mr. Peterson continued playing after his stroke in 1993 because, as he  
told The Chicago Tribune, “I think I have a closeness with the  
instrument that I’ve treasured over the years.” Before long he was  
back on tour and recording, among other albums, “Side by Side” with  
Itzhak Perlman, having learned to do more playing with his right hand.  
As he told Down Beat in 1997: “When I sit down to the piano, I don’t  
want any scuffling. I want it to be a love affair.”

Ben Ratliff contributed reporting.



Copyright 2007The New York Times Company