He made it all seem so easy.
When Oscar Peterson soloed, the notes flowed like water from a fountain. It hardly mattered whether Peterson, who died Sunday at the age of 82 at his home in Mississauga, was playing solo piano, with a small combo, or a big band; he was perennially, preternaturally capable, playing as if he could barely keep the ideas inside him.
Yet no matter how ferociously the notes flowed forth, his solos bore such a strong sense of swing that audiences bobbed happily in their wake, heads swaying gently with the rhythm. Nor did his body betray any sense of exertion, except to the extent that he was very obviously enjoying himself.
Watching Peterson at the keyboard was a bit like watching a duck on a pond – his fingers may have been skittering furiously across the keys, but the rest of him seemed to float effortlessly. It was the sort of display that made jazz piano appear not only fun but almost as easy as singing, something Peterson also did, shadowing his solos with gruff, breathless scat singing.
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In truth, playing piano like Peterson wasn't easy. In fact, it was damned near impossible. Like the great Art Tatum before him, Peterson was prodigiously gifted, possessed of virtuosity beyond anything normally found in jazz. As guitarist (and frequent collaborator) Herb Ellis put it, “most piano players end where [Peterson] starts,” an observation that goes a long way toward explaining why there has been a notable lack of Peterson clones in the jazz world.
He had acolytes, most notably Oliver Jones, who grew up in the same Montreal neighbourhood and studied piano with Peterson's sister Daisy. But for the most part, pianists found it easier to admire Peterson than to imitate him.
Count Basie, who recorded a string of duet albums in the 1970s with Peterson, said he “plays the best ivory box I've ever heard,” while Duke Ellington, no slouch himself, referred to his Canadian comrade as a “Maharajah of the keyboard.” Herbie Hancock moved from classical piano to jazz after being inspired by the “precision” of Peterson's playing, while Diana Krall credits Peterson as the reason she does what she does. “In my high school yearbook it says that my goal is to become a jazz pianist like Oscar Peterson,” she told the Los Angeles Times.
Somehow, though, Peterson's reputation as a giant among jazz pianists didn't quite translate to an equally towering reputation among jazz critics. Typical was English critic Max Harrison, who in 1960 sniffed that Peterson “appears to be concerned mainly with playing the piano and only incidentally with making music.”
Variations on that theme – critics casting Peterson as soulless technician, a piano automaton – would recur throughout his career. To some extent, he was a victim of fashion, as the most celebrated pianists of the mid-1950s and '60s were players whose ideas were considerably stronger than their technique: Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea. Even those whose playing flirted with virtuosity, such as Keith Jarrett or Cecil Taylor, seldom dazzled as Peterson did.
In short, Peterson had the misfortune of being a musical moderate at a time when all the big noise was being made by radicals and rebels.
He came by his chops and his adoration of melody honestly. As a child, Peterson studied piano with Paul de Marky, a student of Franz Liszt; as a young jazz musician, he was hailed as “the Brown Bomber of Boogie-Woogie,” likening his two-fisted technique to that of boxer Joe Louis. But with both Liszt and boogie-woogie, Peterson built his sound and style on music that had plenty of room for dazzle and melody, but relatively little interest in the sort of harmonic innovation Monk and Evans championed.
In the 1930s and 1940s, such an approach made sense, and when Peterson was discovered by producer/entrepreneur Norman Granz (who convinced the young pianist to move away from boogie and toward bebop), he clearly had the makings of a star. Granz introduced the young Canadian to American audiences in 1949, with a cameo appearance at a Carnegie Hall Jazz at the Philharmonic show. Listening to the recording today, you can almost hear the jaws drop as Peterson, on the tune Fine and Dandy, balances a fluid, boppish line in the right hand with surging, Basie-like accents in the left. It was definitely the sound of a star being born.
Granz, who quickly signed Peterson to his Verve imprint, was a good shepherd to the young Canadian, pointing him toward sympathetic sidemen – most notably bassist Ray Brown, guitarist Herb Ellis, and drummer Ed Thigpen – and letting his creativity flower. Being as versatile as he was gifted, Peterson was a natural for Granz's JATP shows, where he shone both on his own and while accompanying everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Stan Getz.
But Granz also helped Peterson play to less obvious strengths, from big band dates like 1959's Swinging Brass with the Oscar Peterson Trio that stressed his big sound and nearly vocal approach to melody, to groove-oriented albums such as the 1962 release Night Train, which found the pianist taking a pared-down approach to the same blues James Brown had on the charts that year.
Peterson's relentless creativity and near-encyclopedic knowledge of standards (both pop and classical) made it easy for him to take on new recording projects, and it's likely that his prolific output – he released nine albums in 1959 alone – contributed to the notion that his playing tended to repetition. From there, it was easy enough to leap to the sneering conclusion that, as critic Martin Williams put it, “Peterson's melodic vocabulary is a stockpile of clichés, that he seems to know every stock riff and lick in the history of jazz.”
That's not quite fair, though. True enough, Peterson liked to pepper his solos with musical quotes, but he was hardly alone in that; indeed, well-placed quotes were considered among the hallmarks of saxophonist Dexter Gordon's mid-1970s comeback. What Williams and the others missed amidst the impossibly fast runs and thuddingly obvious melodic allusions was that Peterson was, above all, a master of subtlety, someone whose greatest moments were harmonic ploys or melodic twists that only those who knew the tunes inside and out would notice.
Not surprisingly, this aspect of his playing came increasingly to the fore as he got older. His albums with Basie are a case in point. At first glance, the two seem little more than a Mutt and Jeff act, with tall, musically garrulous Peterson appearing utterly at odds with the short, taciturn Basie. But the music they made together was playful, witty and wonderfully simpatico, as notable for what wasn't played as for what was.
Above all, the albums with Basie were an absolute gas, and that was perhaps the most striking characteristic of Peterson's approach to piano. He didn't play like he wanted to change the world, or make the audience see things through the prism of his personal vision; he played like he wanted everyone else to have as much fun as he was having.
It may not have been the most profound reason to play jazz, but it was a damn good reason to listen.
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