Jazz piano legend Oscar Peterson dead at 82

CALGARY, Alberta Mon Dec 24, 2007 4:56pm EST



Credit: Reuters/Jean-Bernard Sieber











Peterson was born on August 15, 1925, the fourth of five children of a Canadian Pacific Railway porter who played piano. The family lived in Little Burgundy, a black enclave in Montreal, where Peterson's elder sister, Daisy, gave her siblings their first piano lessons.

Musicians Teddy Wilson and Nat "King" Cole were among early influences. When Peterson was a teenager his father played him a recording of Art Tatum -- the lightning-fast pianist to whom Peterson would later be compared -- which intimidated him so much he stayed away from the piano for a month.

At 14, he began performing for radio and played in a school band that included trumpeter Maynard Ferguson.

His career on the rise, Peterson asked his father if he could drop out of school. The elder Peterson said he would not "let him leave high school to be a jazz piano player. You have to be the best, there is no second best."

He took it to heart.

"When I started I had great belief, and there were quite a few bruises and disappointments along the way, but I never lost the belief," he told Reuters in 1999.

Peterson famously got his big break in the late 1940s when impresario and record producer Norman Granz was in a taxi en route to the Montreal airport, with the radio tuned to a live show featuring Peterson's trio. Granz demanded the cabbie make a beeline to the nightclub, where he met Peterson.

Soon afterward Granz brought him to New York for one of his "Jazz at the Philharmonic" concerts, a showcase for such stars as Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie. Peterson stepped into the big time with a duet with bassist Brown.

"His career just accelerated from that point (1949) on," said jazz pianist and composer Joe Sealy. "He'll be probably most remembered as just an absolutely exquisite and amazing jazz piano player."


He became a regular session player in the 1950s for Granz's Verve Records while leading trios, first with bass and guitar, and later with drummers such as Thigpen, Louis Hayes, Bobby Durham and Martin Drew.

Accolades followed him everywhere, but Peterson always had to fend off some critics who believed his technical prowess outweighed his ability to express emotion on the keyboard.

"Technique is something you use to make your ideas listenable," he once told jazz writer Len Lyons. "You learn to play the instrument so you have a musical vocabulary, and you practice to get your technique to the point you need to express yourself, depending on how heavy your ideas are."

Among his many recordings, he once cited his 1962 album "Night Train," with Brown and Thigpen, and a 1964 ode to his native land, "Canadiana Suite," as his favorites.

Peterson could also be a social activist. In the 1980s, he spearheaded a campaign to convince Canadian advertisers to make television commercials that better represented minorities.

(Additional reporting by Natalie Armstrong)


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