Jazz Virtuoso Dazzled on Piano

"So I did," Peterson said. "And of course I was just about flattened. . . . I swear, I didn't play piano for two months afterward, I was so intimidated."

Peterson began his musical education on trumpet but switched to piano at 5 after developing tuberculosis. An older brother, Fred, had played the piano and passed on his love of jazz before dying from TB.

Peterson said he was at first impatient with the classical repertory required of pianists-in-training. He said he became more amenable when a private music tutor welcomed his interest in jazz, which had grown through popular recordings and broadcasts by such pianists as Tatum, Erroll Garner and Teddy Wilson.

In school, he played in a band with trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and said he liked playing the baby grand piano during lunch hours because it was "the best way to have a bunch of girls come down. I became the guy."

At 14, Peterson won a talent contest on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. radio network, and that led to a regular engagement on a Montreal radio station for a program called "Fifteen Minutes of Piano Rambling" as well as a five-year stint in Johnny Holmes's popular big band.

In 1944, he made his recording debut with boogie-woogie versions of "I Got Rhythm" and "The Sheik of Araby," and he soon began accumulating job offers from American big band leaders including Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford. A perhaps apocryphal story featured Granz, the jazz promoter, being so taken with a live radio broadcast of Peterson at a Montreal club that Granz rushed over and signed him for the Jazz at the Philharmonic series.

Peterson was unbilled during the 1949 Carnegie Hall performance that cemented his reputation in the United States. Granz simply brought him out and said, "Play whatever you like for as long as you like."

His mastery astonished those present, including Parker, Fitzgerald, saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. A Down Beat critic raved, and Peterson soon joined the concert series on a tour of Asia as well as 41 North American cities.

Modeling themselves after Tatum's and Cole's earlier trios, Peterson, Brown and Ellis formed in the early 1950s what is regarded as one of the finest small ensembles in jazz.

Their exquisite work was captured on the hit recording "At the Stratford Shakespearean Festival," as well as many other albums that highlighted their sensitive handling of pop standards by such composers as Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin.

Thigpen replaced Ellis in 1958, and the trio members started a short-lived experiment in jazz education, a Toronto institute called the Advanced School of Contemporary Music.

Their demanding schedule doomed the effort, as they became American cultural ambassadors whose engagements even took them behind the Iron Curtain.