Oscar Peterson

Oscar Peterson: The Maharaja of the Keyboard

Duke Ellington gave him the title and it stuck. Joe Pass, who played beside him for years, put the assessment more clinically: "The only guys I've heard who come close to total mastery of their instruments are Art Tatum and Peterson." And yet the young Montreal prodigy who could out-play anyone in Canada once heard a Tatum record and stopped playing entirely for a period. "Tatum scared me to death," Peterson said. He was, he added, "never cocky again."

Little Burgundy

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was born on 15 August 1925 in Montreal, Quebec, to West Indian immigrants. His mother Kathleen worked as a domestic servant; his father Daniel was a railway porter and a self-taught musician who played organ, trumpet and piano. The family lived in Little Burgundy, the predominantly Black neighbourhood where Montreal's jazz culture was concentrated — a decisive accident of geography.

He began on trumpet and piano at five. At seven, tuberculosis ended the trumpet, and everything went into the keyboard.

Liszt by Descent

Peterson's training was classical and severe. He studied with his sister Daisy and then with Paul de Marky, a Hungarian-born pianist who had studied under István Thomán, himself a pupil of Franz Liszt — a direct pedagogical line from the nineteenth century's supreme virtuoso to a Black teenager in Depression-era Montreal. He practised scales and classical études four to six hours a day for years.

In 1940, at fourteen, he won the CBC's national music competition. He dropped out of the High School of Montreal, where he had played in a band with Maynard Ferguson, and turned professional. Through the 1940s he starred in weekly radio broadcasts, worked hotels and music halls, played with the Johnny Holmes Orchestra and recorded for Victor from 1945 to 1949.

Granz, and Carnegie Hall

The impresario Norman Granz heard a Peterson radio broadcast in 1949 and introduced him at Carnegie Hall during a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert. It is one of the cleanest breaks in jazz history: a national reputation in Canada converted overnight into an international one.

In 1950 he formed a duo with the bassist Ray Brown, and in the early 1950s the Oscar Peterson Trio proper, with Brown and drummer Charlie Smith, later reconfigured around guitarists Irving Ashby, Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis. The 1953–1958 line-up with Brown and Ellis was the one Peterson himself considered the most stimulating setting he ever had. Ed Thigpen replaced Ellis in 1958, and that trio produced *Night Train* and the *Canadiana Suite* between 1963 and 1965.

The trio disbanded in 1970. Peterson released *Tristeza on Piano* and built a new group around the guitarist Joe Pass and the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen; their album *The Trio* won the 1974 Grammy for Best Jazz Performance by a Group. The British drummer Martin Drew joined in 1974. In 1978 he played the interval act at the Eurovision Song Contest in Paris; in the 1980s he performed duos with Herbie Hancock.

The Sound

Peterson's style was a synthesis. Bach underpinned the counterpoint and the discipline; Teddy Wilson, Nat King Cole and Art Tatum supplied the jazz vocabulary; swing, boogie-woogie and ragtime supplied the pulse; and the harmonic density owed something to Rachmaninoff's piano concertos. He was equally functional as soloist, accompanist and ensemble player — a rarer combination than it sounds — and he elevated the jazz piano trio into a serious compositional format rather than a rhythm-section convenience.

He also toured the American South at a time when doing so was dangerous. Granz defended his musicians directly against segregation, on one occasion confronting an armed Southern policeman who tried to stop the trio from using whites-only taxis.

The Stroke

In 1993 Peterson suffered a stroke that weakened his left side and removed him from work for two years. Incoming Prime Minister Jean Chrétien offered him the Lieutenant-Governorship of Ontario that year; he declined on grounds of ill health. He returned to occasional performance and recording for Telarc from 1995, playing principally with his right hand. The politician Bob Rae's verdict has become the standard one: "a one-handed Oscar was better than just about anyone with two hands."

Why Oscar Is Called a Genius

The genius claim about Peterson is not metaphorical and the people making it are his peers. Ellington called him the "Maharaja of the keyboard"; Joe Pass placed him alongside Art Tatum as one of two musicians with total mastery of the instrument. The quality in question is specific and partly physical: an execution speed and evenness of touch that let him play ideas at the moment he had them, with no lag between conception and hand. Combine that with a classically trained ear for voice-leading and a harmonic imagination shaped by Rachmaninoff, and you get improvisation that survives transcription — the lines hold up as written music, which is not true of every great soloist.

It should be said plainly that a large part of this is craft built by labour: four to six hours of scales and études daily, for years, before he was out of his teens. He knew this better than anyone, which is why hearing Tatum flattened him.

The counter-case is the standing critique of Peterson within jazz: that his fluency could tip into decoration, that he was a supreme executant rather than an innovator on the scale of Monk, Powell or Coltrane, and that he extended the swing tradition superbly instead of breaking it. That is fair. Peterson changed no one's idea of what jazz could be. What he did was raise the ceiling of what a pianist could physically do inside it — and, after 1993, demonstrate that the musical intelligence had never been in the hands to begin with.

Legacy

Peterson died of kidney failure at his home in Mississauga, Ontario, on 23 December 2007. He left more than two hundred recordings and thousands of concerts across a career of more than sixty years. He won eight Grammy Awards between 1975 and 1997 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; DownBeat named him Pianist of the Year in 1950 and for twelve consecutive years after. Canada made him an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1972 and a Companion in 1984, and added the Order of Ontario, the Governor General's Performing Arts Award and the Glenn Gould Prize; abroad came the Praemium Imperiale in 1999 and the UNESCO Music Prize in 2000. Parks, concert halls, schools, statues and a commemorative coin carry his name. To his friends he was simply O.P.; to the jazz world he was the King of inside swing.