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The Vancouver Sun . . . Saturday, October 7, 1950

By Clyde Gilmour

The unhappy lot of the prophet who goes without honor in his own country has been paralleled in the career of many a Canadian musician. (The word “honor.” of course, is used to imply wide public acceptance and an enviable cash balance in the bank.) An interesting specimen in this category is Oscar Peterson, the young and gifted Negro pianist of Toronto, Montreal and points east.

I don’t mean that Mr. P. is a nonentity in his native land. His considerable and expanding talent has been watched (and heard) with admiration and mild excitement by thousands of enthusiasts from Atlantic to Pacific. But Oscar Peterson’s is still not exactly a household name among the great mass of his fellow-citizens. Millions who have never heard of him could mention, at the drop of a hint, two or three dozen other jazz-men, mostly Americans, many of whom are unworthy to play in the same small combo with Canada’s Oscar.

This regrettable situation may soon be at least partially adjusted by the circulation of a new made-in-Manhattan Mercury album containing three 10-inch discs representing Mr. P. in his finest present-day estate.

There is a bit too much surface-scratch on a couple of sides in the copy I have been hearing, but none of this interferes more than slightly with the enjoyable music and the generally high calibre of the performance and reproduction. The Peterson style embodied in this valuable package is at once clean, masculine, tender, imaginative, rhythmic, and technically expert - an uncommon grouping of pianistic merits. The soloist is accompanied only by the subdued but meaningful bass of Ray Brown. Except for Mr. P.’s own " Oscar Blues," the numbers chosen are all from the durable repertory: "Three O’Clock in the Morning", "They Didn’t Believe Me", "All the Things You Are", "Lover Come Back to Me", and the imperishable "Where or When".

The agreebly (sic) brief and pointed album-notes by Mercury’s Norman Granz should help Canadians to realize that our Oscar truly is a lad worth keeping an eye on, not to mention both ears.

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