© Reproduced courtesy The Toronto Star Syndicate

Transcription:

Starweek
p.5

"In The Key of Oscar is an intimate portrait
of the life and brilliant career
of the gifted Canadian musician/composer,
jazz pianist Oscar Peterson"

[Caption under picture 1 (bottom)]
The young Oscar Peterson never practised the piano as diligently as his sister Daisy

[Caption under picture 2 (top right)]
Oscar Peterson put aside his dislike of working with TV to make In The Key Of Oscar, Sun., 8 p.m., chs. 3, 5, 12

Oscar Peterson isn't fond of television. "I've usually fought against it," says the Montreal-born musician/ composer and the world's greatest living jazz pianist. He's contemplating the likely effects on his career of In The Key Of Oscar, a moving and intimate two-hour documentary.

"I've never liked working with TV. I don't think it's a sensitive medium. TV people are so obsessed with what they do, that they often intrude, distract both the performer and the people who've paid money for a special, intimate experience. My personal obligation is to my audience. And so, I haven't been TV's best friend."

That opinion has been tempered somewhat since Peterson, 67, saw the final cut of In The Key Of Oscar, distilled from more than 80 hours of videotaped and archival material by producers Sylvia Sweeney and her Elitha Peterson Productions crew, and the National Film Board's Dennis Murphy and Michael Allder.

What started out as a personal overview of Canada by one of its most celebrated overachievers - renowned concert and recording star for 40 years, winner of seven Grammy awards, recipient of countless honorary doctorates and degrees, Companion of the Order of Canada and Chancellor of York University - became a probing musical portrait only after Sweeney realized many Canadians still regard Peterson as an American.

"Early on, we decided it was more important for Canadians to know who he is," says the former W5 co-host/reporter, sports journalist, and Canadian basketball team member in two Olympic Games. Sweeney is also Peterson's niece.

The documentary uses a train journey from Toronto to Montreal (for the first ever Peterson family reunion) as a metaphor to parallel the pianist's artisitic [sic] odyssey. The reunion itself is a dramatic conclusion, a watershed where old rivalries, feelings of loss and abandonment, and finally overwhelming love pour forth over a groaning feast table.

"I was very apprehensive about that dinner," Peterson says. "You see me asking Sylvia (on-camera) what's going to happen. I thought about it for a while and decided, 'What comes out, comes out.' "

In The Key Of Oscar tracks Peterson's career from his origins in Montreal's ethnically diverse St. Henri district, where his father, an immigrant railway porter born in the British West Indies, encouraged his son and daughter, Daisy, to learn to play the piano - "not just well, but better than the best" - as a way of escaping a life of poverty and repression.

Oscar was no natural student. While his father was away. Daisy, one of Canada's most respected piano teachers, would diligently practise, while her brother roamed the neighborhood. So good was his ear, however, that he'd pick up her lessons almost by osmosis just before their father's return.

Peterson's competitive urge kicked in during his early 20s, when he was featured on local and national radio programs, won his first recording contract and toured the continent first as a regular member then as a featured soloist with the Johnny Holmes Orchestra. The documentary contains rare movie footage, radio performances - in one of them, the young Peterson is condescendingly referred to as "boy" throughout an otherwise enthusiastic interview - and still photographs from the period, as well as concert footage from the all-star "Jazz At The Philharmonic" international tours promoted by jazz entrepreneur Norman Granz.

The Granz shows, which rocketed the young pianist to international stardom, were "a fantasy come true," he admits in the documentary. "I was thrown among the best. I had done my homework and I figured they were within reach."

In The Key Of Oscar includes spectacular concert material and revealing back-stage confrontations culled from Peterson's lengthy performing career, and fascinating anecdotes from peers and colleagues Granz, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Oliver Jones, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, Ed Thigpen, Dudley Moore, Cleo Laine, and John Dankworth, among others.

For all that, it's an intensely close look at an astonishingly gifted artist who has struggled against economic, racial, cultural and social tides to become a true star, even if Canadians have appeared reluctant to embrace him.

"I always wanted to be respected and honored at home," he says. "I'm not surprised that it has taken so long for my own people to know me. It's not as if we live in a crowded country. There have always been spaces between us, and communication isn't exactly our strongest suit."

"This special, I hope, will help change that."

-Greg Quill

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