By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Oscar Peterson, 82, a jazz piano virtuoso who accompanied musicians as diverse as Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker during a six-decade career and became one of the most-recorded and honored jazz pianists of all time, has died.
He died Dec. 23 at his home in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, a family friend told the Associated Press. The cause of death was kidney failure, said Mississauga's mayor, Hazel McCallion.
Peterson, a Canadian-born musical prodigy, recorded more than 200 albums and won eight Grammy Awards, including one for lifetime achievement in 1997.
Peterson showed technical and emotional brilliance across the jazz spectrum, from bop to blues, and his chief piano influences were astonishingly different -- Art Tatum, a master of jaw-droppingly-fast swing, as well as Nat King Cole, the legendarily tender balladeer.
A critical appraisal of Peterson's work conveyed how deep his talents ran. Jazz reviewer Leonard Feather once wrote that Peterson "can extract the gentlest whimper, the profoundest roar or the deepest indigo wails from his keyboard." Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, said yesterday, "Any pianist who came after Oscar Peterson would have had to look up to him as a model of all-around musicianship."
Peterson excelled in the trio format and had long musical relationships with bassist Ray Brown, guitarist Herb Ellis and drummer Ed Thigpen. As a soloist, he was sometimes criticized for following too closely in the "rococo" tradition of Tatum, who died in 1956. Peterson showed far more subtlety as an accompanist to such singers as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday as well as such horn players as Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, said Ira Gitler, a jazz historian and producer.
Gitler added that Peterson's blues, swing and bop were unfailingly tasteful and elegant, which made him far more accessible to mass audiences than such avant-garde innovators as Gillespie or saxophonist John Coltrane.
Peterson first gained widespread notice in the Unites States during a 1949 Carnegie Hall performance, and he subsequently toured in the early 1950s with impresario Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series.
Through recent years, Peterson continued a schedule of international concert and club dates even after a stroke in 1993 cost him full use of his left hand.
"I hate to sound egotistical, but I'm not an apprehensive person," he said soon after his recovery as he began making the jazz album "Side by Side" with classical violinist Itzhak Perlman. "I usually have some indication I more than likely can pull it off, or I wouldn't have gone, believe me. I hate halfway measures."
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was born Aug. 15, 1925, in Montreal to parents from the West Indies. His father, a railroad porter and amateur organist, pushed music on his five children, beating them if they did not play well and criticizing them mercilessly even when they did.
Peterson recalled that after he started to establish himself, his father once brought home a Tatum recording and said, "You think you're so great. Why don't you put it on?"
"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.
Peterson later taught at other schools, always emphasizing technique so students "can face whatever they come up against."
In the mid-1960s, the Peterson-Brown-Thigpen trio broke apart. Peterson remained the star attraction in later trio incarnations, including one from the 1970s with guitarist Joe Pass and bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen. He won his first Grammy, in 1974, for a recording with Pass and Pederson called "The Trio." Two albums in the early 1990s reuniting Peterson with Ellis and Brown also won Grammys.
Peterson formed a piano duet with Herbie Hancock in the early 1980s but later slimmed down to a solo show, once telling The Washington Post he felt less restricted harmonically when playing alone. "The bass player would always wonder where we are going," he said.
Beyond the piano, Peterson branched out as a singer on a 1965 tribute album to Cole, and reviewers noted he bore a vocal style strikingly similar to Cole's. He also wrote several ambitious pieces of music, including "Canadiana Suite" (1964) and "Africa Suite" (1983). He composed for film and hosted several television shows about jazz, including one for the British Broadcasting Corp. in 1976 called "Oscar Peterson's Piano Party."
Peterson was playing at the Blue Note club in New York when he suffered a stroke in 1993. He underwent a year of physical therapy before launching his career again on the recording and concert circuit.
Pianist Benny Green, a protege who recorded the 1997 duo album "Oscar and Benny," told the Los Angeles Times about his mentor: "Oscar told me that the first thing he does when he sits down at a piano is to gauge the key drop -- how far the keys on an individual instrument need to be depressed before the hammer hits the strings.
"He says -- and he makes it sound so simple -- that once he scopes that out, then he's in complete control of the piano. For the rest of us, of course, there are a lot more steps involved."
Peterson's marriages to Lillie Fraser, Sandra King and Charlotte Huber ended in divorce. Survivors include his fourth wife, Kelly Peterson, and their daughter, Celine. He had six other children from the previous marriages.
Peterson was a towering figure in the literal sense, standing over six feet tall and weighing more than 250 pounds. Ray Brown once spoke of Peterson's "drill sergeant" tendencies, but audience members found him, by and large, a serene and engaging performer -- except when interrupted by loud talk or clinking glasses.
He was known to have barked at one offender, "Would you act this way at a classical concert?"