© By permission of the author (Gene Lees)

Transcription:

July 1975, vol. 88 no. 7

Music

By Gene Lees

He seems never to have expended a moment of his creative energies on the Canadian pastime of agonizing over one's identity. Perhaps that is because he is black, and thus always was a "different" Canadian. Yet when black militancy began dividing the American jazz world, he remained apart, perhaps because he is a Canadian, and once dismissed its first article of faith - that no white man could play "authentic" jazz - as a "lot of junk." Fully aware on the one hand that the main creative drive in jazz has come from black musicians, he believes on the other hand that each man brings to it his own environmental values.

He has always been his own separate man. He is an example of what Colin Wilson called "the outsider."

This outsider, Oscar Peterson, (above) originally of the St. Henri district in Montreal and latterly of Paris and London and New York and Sydney and Tokyo, is quite possibly the greatest pianist in the history of jazz.

The Argentine-born film composer Lalo Schifrin is among the most thoroughly schooled of modern musicians. Trained at the Paris Conservatory by Charles Koechlin and Olivier Messiaen, he was himself an excellent jazz pianist with Dizzy Gillespie's quintet before settling in Hollywood. "Oscar represents," he says, "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. After that, the pianists began playing what was written. Oscar is a true romantic in the 19th-century sense, with the addition of the 20th-century Afro-American jazz tradition. He is a top-class virtuoso."

This response is common. Peterson has astounding speed. Only Phineas Newborn and the late Art Tatum, one of his idols and mentors, have equaled him. And he has a power of direct swing that Tatum never equaled. His ideas are not always original; on a poor night, he falls back on his own highly identifiable phrases of musical vocabulary and some that he got from others, such as a curious spinning chromatic figure of Dizzy Gillespie's. But these alone can be electrifying - the brilliantly clear and perfectly balanced runs, like streams of sparks, the great chords whacked into perfect place in the swing with a left hand that plays tenths effortlessly and could, I suppose, if he wanted, encompass twelfths, the dizzying passages in octaves that utilize a left hand as proficient as the right.

When he was asked for an evaluation of his work, Peterson's longtime close friend, arranger and composer Phil Nimmons, who orchestrated Peterson's Canadiana Suite, hesitated for a while. "Oh ...oh ... I don't know what to say. It is overwhelming. The piano is like an extension of his own physical being. I'm amazed at the speed of his creativity. I am not talking about mere technical capabilities, although his are awesome. I'm speaking of the times when you find him under optimum conditions of creativity. His mind can move as quickly as his fingers and that is what is so astounding. It's all going by so fast that it's almost too much to absorb, which may be why some critics have had trouble with him."

Everyone who has followed Peterson's work closely knows those moments of which Nimmons speaks: sometimes late at night, in a club, when the expense account people and the knife-and-fork table drummers have gone, he uses the quiet for ballads, lovely, soft, and pensive. That is a part of his playing too few people know.

He has always been a virtuoso soloist. He began with the trumpet, but he contracted tuberculosis as a child and had to give it up. Piano was the substitute. Ironically, his brother Charles began as a pianist, and when he was injured in an accident, turned to the trumpet. Both their sisters were pianists and it was from the eldest, Daisy, that Oscar received his first training. As a child he practised several hours a day - voluntarily. In fact his mother had to pull him away from the piano in the evenings. Except for a period in the Johnny Holmes band in Montreal during his early twenties, he has always had his own group - at one time a duo with bassist Ray Brown, and later various trios - in which he has been the dominant figure.

It was 25 years ago that jazz impresario Norman Granz heard him play and decided to take him to New York for an appearance with Jazz at the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. He left audience and critics flabbergasted, and he has been traveling ever since.

He is 49 now, and he talks at times of retiring, though it should be noted that he's been doing that for years. He's tired of the road. He likes to be with his wife, Sandra, at their home in Mississauga, with his own piano and complex of sophisticated recording equipment that his son Norman (for Norman Granz), one of the five children of his previous marriage, seems to know more about than he does. And he likes to take off for their summer home north of Haliburton and fish. At such times, not even his sister May, who takes care of much of the business of his career, can find him.

Perhaps one of the reasons he's thinking of retiring is the pain that playing brings him. He has arthritis in his hands. "It almost always hurts when I play now," he told me quietly two or three years ago. Yet there is no diminution of his massive energy, no surrender to his discomfort. That is part of him: an unrelenting self-discipline.

There is something larger than life about Peterson. Astrology buffs will not be surprised to learn that he is a Leo. Elegantly articulate, stubborn as hell, thoughtful, gentle, capable of enormous anger that he almost always controls and great laughter that he doesn't, more easily hurt than he will admit, he is a big man; big in the chest and shoulders, big in the arms, big in the hands. His passion for music found itself embodied in an absolutely perfect physical tool.

Canada has produced two prodigious pianists, one in classical music, one in jazz. Both built world reputations without leaving home except for concerts and recording. Both live in Toronto. They are, of course, Glenn Gould and Oscar Peterson. They have never met. Isn't that odd? Outsiders.

List of Articles

Previous | Next