 The Toronto Star |
Oscar Peterson, one of the world's greatest jazz pianists, was Chancellor, York University, from July 1991 to January 1994 |
Oscar Peterson
When Dizzy Gillespie was playing in Montreal, in response to the crowd’s urgings, the late, great jazz trumpeter invited a local pianist to play a set with his jazz band. The band opened the set with “What is This Thing Called Love?” and, as one observer recalls, “Dizzy’s eyes were like saucers with disbelief.”
The pianist who so impressed one of the most important figures of the jazz world was Oscar Peterson. He also impressed Duke Ellington, who dubbed him “the maharajah of the piano.” And Coleman Hawkins exclaimed, after a gig at Montreal’s Cafe St. Michel, “I’d like to take you back to New York and have a whole bunch of cats hear you.”
A trip to New York occurred in September 1949 and, when Oscar was introduced to an audience as a visitor from Canada, Mike Levin of Down Beat magazine recalls that the Montreal pianist “stopped the Norman Granz ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ concert dead cold in its tracks.”
| The Toronto Star |
Oscar Peterson, one of the world's greatest jazz pianists, was Chancellor, York University, from July 1991 to January 1994 |
Four decades later, jazz pianist Roger Kellaway met Oscar at Milan, Italy, and told his biographer, Gene Lees, “One of the reasons I revere Oscar is that ... he’s a total musician. He’s absolutely complete as a pianist.”
Peterson established his love for and his skill with the piano at an early age. It was recognized that, at age five, he had perfect pitch. His musical father, a railroad porter, virtually sat him at the piano with orders to play. Oscar had no difficulty in obliging and recalls that he would, when possible, practise from nine until noon, eat lunch, practise from one until six, and after dinner, practise again from 7.30 p.m. until his mother dragged him away to bed.
One of Oscar’s teachers, Lou Hooper, on his first visit when Oscar was 11 years old, was astonished “not only at what I was hearing but [at] the intelligent interpretation, the easy and adequate technique while playing entirely from memory.” Three years later, Paul de Marky became his teacher, the same year that Oscar’s older sister, Daisy, entered her shy kid brother in the “Ken Soble Amateur Hour” on CBC. Oscar won and soon had a weekly 15-minute broadcast on a local radio station and guest appearances on various CBC national shows such as “The Happy Gang.” He also became pianist for the Johnny Holmes Orchestra while attending Montreal High School. By 1947 he was playing at a downtown club, the Alberta Lounge, and making his first recordings with RCA.
At the Alberta Lounge, Peterson met many of the top-name jazz stars visiting Montreal. Norman Granz, owner and manager of “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concerts, sought him out and quickly invited Oscar to make a guest appearance in New York. The Carnegie Hall appearance established Oscar as a permanent member of the Norman Granz group of musical artists. The following year the group, along with soloist performers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, Buddy Rich, and Gene Krupa, went on a 52-city tour.
Within a few years Peterson was one of the group’s highest-paid members and making numerous records for Granz. A Time magazine feature in 1953 opened, “At the age of 28, a Montreal Negro named Oscar Peterson is one of the world’s finest jazz pianists.” It pointed out that Mr. Peterson was returning to Montreal to be with his family as well as to spend four to six hours a day practising the classics. As Oscar explained, “I play Chopin because he gives you the reach. Scarlatti gives you the close fingering. Ravel and Debussy help you on those pretty, lush harmonics. Bach gives you counterpoint.”
The Oscar Peterson Trio included bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis. As owner of a recording company and Peterson’s manager, Granz released dozens of their records on the Verve label. One of the most outstanding was recorded at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in 1956. In 1958, a drummer, Ed Thigpen, replaced Ellis. His arrival prompted more recordings. In 1959 during a six-day session, 124 tracks were made to produce eight new albums.
Critics claimed Granz was over recording his most successful artist. There was also criticism of Petersons’s playing. One critic said he was “too commercial,” and another observed, “His improvisations often seemed haphazard structures.” A French writer stated, “Peterson’s metre and accent are far too mechanical to mean anything very positive,” and an American wrote, “His melodic vocabulary is a stockpile of cliches.”
Oscar and Granz tended to dismiss the critics as did some of the most schooled musicians. Lalo Schifrin, a composer who trained at the Paris Conservatory, wrote, “Oscar represents a tradition lost in this century — the virtuoso piano improviser, like Chopin, the tradition of bravura playing that started with Beethoven and reached its apotheosis with Franz Liszt.”
In 1963, Oscar, with Ray and Ed, visited Villingen, Germany, to perform a private engagement at the home of Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, who, passionately interested in jazz, had a nine-foot grand piano and the most modern recording equipment. Annual visits and recording sessions followed until 1968 when Brunner-Schwer arranged to release four albums from these sessions on an MPS label. Peterson and other musicians felt these were the best he had ever made. The critics agreed. One critic in London commented about the “My Favourite Instrument” album: “It is a luxury to be able to indulge in a categorical statement for once and assert that this is the best record that Peterson ever made.”
In 11 years Peterson made 15 albums for MPS. In 1963 he also recorded his own composition, Canadian Suite. African Suite followed in 1979. In 1984 Peterson went on a tour of Russia that ended abruptly because of the poor treatment he and Granz received there.
 The Toronto Star |
“Oscar represents a
tradition lost in this century — the virtuoso piano improvisor, like Chopin, the
tradition of bravura playing that started with Beethoven and reached its apotheosis with
Franz Liszt.” Lalo
Schifrin |
In the 1980s Peterson became involved in an issue closer to home when he took exception to Canadian television commercials that ignored blacks, Chinese, or Japanese. An article in Toronto Life by Gene Lees expressed Oscar’s concern, and soon newspapers picked it up. The Attorney General for Ontario, the Honourable Roy McMurtry, co-hosted several low-key lunches for advertising firms and company executives with Peterson as the key speaker.
“Oscar played a very major role,” McMurtry recalls. “I think it was a very important initiative. Oscar is somebody I am very proud to know.” Oscar admits that “there was a certain amount of shock value when I spoke out on the subject because I think I have a fairly creditable record as a human being, and as a Canadian.”
Canadians have agreed. Besides being named the best jazz player 14 times in the Down Beat Readers Poll as well as in numerous other polls in the United States, he has, in Canada, won three Grammy awards, been awarded honorary degrees by nine Canadian universities, been named in 1973 an Officer of the Order of Canada and elevated in 1984 to Companion of the Order. None of this has changed him from being friendly and approachable. Once, when his wife chided him about the Order of Canada, Peterson shot back, saying, “Hey, that means a lot to me. I can think back when I was a kid. I never dreamed my country would honour me.”
