Oscar Peterson passed away Sunday, December 30 at age 82 from kidney failure and lingering effects of a stroke suffered in 1993. Canada’s most prominent jazz musician and one of the country’s best-known citizens, Peterson led his own trios and also played with all of the jazz greats, including Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He held multiple honorary degrees, won seven Grammy Awards and was a Companion of the Order of Canada. He also fought for racial equality all his life.
Stylistically, Peterson stuck to his guns over the years and remained close to the swing genre of jazz through all the vagaries of musical shifts during his career, which began at age 14 in the late 1930s. Unlike some of his peers — such as Miles Davis, who embraced the avant-garde in the 1960s and jazz-funk-fusion in the 1970s — Peterson saw his mission perhaps as a preserver of the swing piano tradition embodied by the massive piano style of Art Tatum (1909-1956).
Calgarians had close access to Dr. Peterson in 1974 when he was a teacher at the inaugural Banff Centre Jazz Workshop co-founded with clarinetist, composer, bandleader and University of Toronto professor emeritus Phil Nimmons. Peterson’s first question to students that summer was: “How many of you have Art Tatum recordings?” He spent a lot of time that week talking about the importance of Tatum’s playing for its full use of the piano, substitute chords, harmonic complications and overall virtuosity. Peterson also emphasized that young pianists must learn to play solo piano (“What if you are at a party and get asked to play? Are you going to say ‘I can only play if my trio is here?’”). He also talked about the necessity of studying classical music to develop a strong technique as a sound basis for playing jazz.
However, not all of his admonitions had to do with complexities and virtuosity; Peterson also extolled the virtues of the simple and effective piano style of Count Basie. “I would be playing all these notes and would be painting myself into a corner, and he would wipe me out with just a few effectively placed notes,” he said of recording with Basie.
In his playing and teaching, Peterson stressed the “Great American Songbook,” songs written in the early and middle part of the 20th century for Broadway shows and films by writers such as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin and others, that became standard vehicles for jazz improvisation. His recordings embraced this material and covered a wide variety of these songs, sometimes reaching out to the more obscure ones.
Peterson was sensitive to issues around racism, having experienced discrimination throughout his career, and made public statements from time to time in this regard. Most recently, he was the subject of some racist taunts, slurs and printed material in his home in Mississauga, and he talked publicly about how disappointed he was to be the target of this type of hatred.
Somehow all of the awards received by Oscar Peterson do not fully document his importance in the international community; his greatness transcends them all. He was a giant in jazz, a humanitarian and fighter for civil rights. Notable Oscar Peterson Trio recordings include Night Train (selected as the only jazz album in the 2007 book “The Top 100 Canadian Albums” by Bob Mersereau), Canadiana Suite (if you can find it), and We Get Requests.
