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Oscar Peterson, Virtuoso of Jazz, Dies at 82
Oscar Peterson performing at Birdland in 2006.
Oscar Peterson, whose dazzling piano playing made him one of the most popular jazz artists in history, died Sunday night at his home in Mississauga, Ontario, outside Toronto. He was 82.
Audio Clips
An Excerpt from 'Blues for Big Scotia' 
Oscar Peterson performing at Birdland in Aug. 2006.
The cause was kidney failure, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported. Mr. Peterson had performed publicly for a time even after a stroke he suffered in 1993 had compromised movement in his left hand.
Mr. Peterson was one of the greatest virtuosos in jazz, with a technique that was always meticulous and ornate and sometimes overwhelming. But rather than expand the boundaries of jazz, he used his gifts in the service of moderation and reliability and in gratifying his devoted audiences, whether playing in a trio or solo. His technical accomplishments were always evident, almost transparently so. Even at his peak, there was very little tension in his playing.
One of the most prolific major stars in jazz history, he amassed an enormous discography. From the 1950s until his death, he released sometimes four or five albums a year, toured Europe and Japan frequently, and became a big draw at jazz festivals.
Norman Granz, his influential manager and producer, helped Mr. Peterson realize that success, setting loose a flow of records on his own Verve and Pablo labels and establishing him as a favorite in the touring “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concerts in the 1940s and ’50s.
Mr. Peterson won eight Grammy awards, as well as almost every possible honor in the jazz world. He played alongside giants of jazz like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, Nat King Cole, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington.
Ellington referred to him as “Maharajah of the keyboard.” Count Basie said, “Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I’ve ever heard." The pianist and conductor Andre Previn called Mr. Peterson “the best” there was among jazz pianists.
In a review of a performance in 1987, Stephen Holden, writing in The New York Times, said, “Mr. Peterson’s rock-solid sense of swing, grounded in Count Basie, is balanced by a delicacy of tone and fleetness of touch that make his extended runs seem to almost disappear into the sky.” He added, “His amazing speed was matched by an equally amazing sense of thematic invention.”
But many critics found Mr. Peterson more derivative than original, especially early in his career. Some even suggested that his fantastic technique lacked coherence and was almost too much for some listeners to comprehend.
Billy Taylor, a fellow pianist and jazz historian, said he thought that while Mr. Peterson was a “remarkable musician,” his “phenomenal facility sometimes gets in the way of people’s listening.”
Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 1966 that Mr. Peterson’s playing “continues to be a pudding made of the leavings of Art Tatum, Nat Cole and Teddy Wilson.”
The critical ambivalence was typified in 1973 by a review of a Peterson performance by John S. Wilson of The Times. Mr. Wilson wrote: “For the last 20 years, Oscar Peterson has been one of the most dazzling exponents of the flying fingers school of piano playing. His performances have tended to be beautifully executed displays of technique but woefully weak on emotional projection.”
The complaints evoked those heard in the 1940s about the great concert violinist Jascha Heifetz, who was occasionally accused of being so technically brilliant that one could not find his or the composer’s heart and soul in the music he played.
Gene Lees, Mr. Peterson’s biographer, defended Mr. Peterson as “a summational artist.”
“So was Mozart. So was Bach,” Mr. Lees wrote in his biography, “The Will to Swing (1990). “Bach and Mozart were both dealing with known vocabularies and an accepted body of aesthetic principles.” He noted that just as Bach used material that he first heard in Vivaldi. “Oscar uses a curious spinning figure that he got from Dizzy Gillespie,” Mr. Lees wrote.
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was born in the poor St. Antoine district of Montreal on Aug. 15, 1925, one of five children of Daniel Peterson, a West Indian immigrant, and the former Olivia John, whom Daniel had met in Montreal. Daniel Peterson worked as a sleeping car porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway and had taught himself how to play the organ before he landed in Halifax in 1917. Mr. Peterson’s mother, who also had roots in the Caribbean, encouraged Oscar to study music.
As a boy, Oscar began to learn the trumpet as well as the piano. At age 7, he contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized for 13 months. Fearing the strain the trumpet might have on his son’s lungs, Daniel Peterson persuaded Oscar to concentrate on piano. He studied first with Lou Hopper, then with Paul Alexander de Marsky, a Hungarian who had also given lessons to Oscar’s older sister, Daisy.
By his own account, Oscar believed he had become quite accomplished by age 14. Then heard a recording by Art Tatum.
“I gave up the piano for two solid months,” Mr. Peterson later recalled, and had “crying fits at night” because, he thought, that nobody else could ever be as good as Tatum.
The same year, however, he won an amateur competition sponsored by the CBC, prompting him to drop out of Montreal High School so that he could spend all his time playing the piano.
By 1942, Oscar Peterson was known in Canada as the “Brown Bomber of Boogie-Woogie,” an allusion to the nickname of the boxer Joe Louis and also to Mr. Peterson’s physical stature — 6 foot 3 and 25o pounds. Mr. Peterson became the only black member of the Johnny Holmes Orchestra, which toured both Canada and the United States. In parts of the United States, he discovered that he, like other blacks, would not be served in the same hotels and restaurants as the white musicians. Many times they would bring food out to him as he sat in the band’s bus, he recalled.
For a time, Mr. Peterson was so identified with boogie-woogie, a popular dance music, that he was denied wider recognition as a serious jazz musician. In 1947, the jazz impresario Norman Granz was on his way to Montreal’s airport in a taxi when he heard a live broadcast of Peterson playing at a Montreal lounge. He ordered the driver to turn the taxi around and take him to the lounge. There he persuaded Mr. Peterson to move away from boogie-woogie.
Mr. Peterson eventually became a mainstay of the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” series, which Mr. Granz created in the 1940s. In 1949, Mr. Peterson made his debut at Carnegie Hall and became a sensation. And a year later, he won Down Beat magazine’s reader’s poll for the first time; he would go on to win it 13 more times, the last time in 1972.
Over the years, his albums sold well, and he sometimes sang, recording numbers with Billy Holiday, Fred Astaire, Benny Carter, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Eldridge, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Buddy DeFranco and many others.
Among his more notable long-playing recordings were the Song Books of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Harry Warren, Harold Arlen and Jimmy McHugh.
Perhaps his most famous threesome — from 1953 to 1958 — was with the guitarist Herb Ellis and the bassist Ray Brown.
In 1964, he recorded “The Canadiana Suite,” an extended work written for his home country; later, he wrote “African Suite” and then “A Royal Wedding Suite,” for the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. Verve and Pablo released most of Mr. Peterson’s work, but he also recorded for the MPS and Telarc labels, among others.
Mr. Peterson was frequently invited to perform for heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II and President Richard M. Nixon. In 2005 he became the first living person other than a reigning monarch to obtain a commemorative stamp in Canada, where streets, squares, concert halls and schools are named after him.
According to the CBC, Mr. Peterson was married four times and had six children from his first and third marriages: Lyn, Sharon, Gay, Oscar Jr., Norman and Joel. He also had a daughter, Celine, with his fourth wife, Kelly.
Mr. Peterson continued playing after his stroke in 1993 because, as he told The Chicago Tribune, “I think I have a closeness with the instrument that I’ve treasured over the years.” Before long he was back on tour and recording “Side By Side” with Itzhak Perlman, having learned to do more playing with his right hand. As he told Down Beat in 1997: “When I sit down to the piano, I don’t want any scuffling. I want it to be a love affair.”
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