[Dixielandjazz] N Y Times Oscar Peterson Obit

Marek Boym marekboym at gmail.com
Wed Dec 26 08:43:31 PST 2007


Peterson was great.  Byt sometimes, as Billy Taylor said, his
technique got the better of him.  Which is why I've always considered
the guitar trios superior to the drums ones - the guitar kept him in
curb!
Cheers

On 25/12/2007, Steve Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Here is OP's obit from the NY Times. The critical portions below talk of OP
> detractors. Many said  he had so much technique that he had no soul.
>
> Well, they did not hear everything OP did. I particularly remember a trio
> rendition of Green Dolphin Street that had more jazz soul than most others
> will ever play. And very original in structure. Simple one or two finger
> melodic phrases etc., strung together by that great rhythm section, lots of
> space etc. Also a "Georgia On My Mind" that combined technique with soul and
> a locked hands Blues that blows most other pianists far away.
>
> As you can tell, I dismiss his critics out of hand. Especially Billy Taylor
> who said OPs facility sometimes gets in the way of people's listening.
> Perhaps true as far as it goes, but OP had a much larger audience than most
> jazz musicians of his era.
>
> Miles Davis disliked his playing but then Miles was short on technique and
> maybe just a bit jealous? <grin>
>
> OP was IMO, one of the best jazz musicians I ever saw.
>
> Cheers,
> Steve Barbone
>
> NY TIMES - December 24, 2007 - By RICHARD SEVERO
>
> Oscar Peterson, Virtuoso of Jazz, Dies at 82
>
> 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.
>
> 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 ³Jazz at the
> Philharmonic² concerts in the 1940s and ¹50s.
>
> 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 ³Maharajah of the keyboard.² Count Basie said,
> ³Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I¹ve ever heard." The pianist and
> conductor Andre Previn called Mr. Peterson ³the best² there was among jazz
> pianists.
>
> In a review of a performance in 1987, Stephen Holden, writing in The New
> York Times, said, ³Mr. Peterson¹s 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.² He added,
> ³His amazing speed was matched by an equally amazing sense of thematic
> invention.²
>
> 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 ³remarkable musician,² his ³phenomenal facility
> sometimes gets in the way of people¹s listening.²
>
> Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 1966 that Mr.
> Peterson¹s playing ³continues to be a pudding made of the leavings of Art
> Tatum, Nat Cole and Teddy Wilson.²
>
> The critical ambivalence was typified in 1973 by a review of a Peterson
> performance by John S. Wilson of The Times. Mr. Wilson wrote: ³For 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.²
>
> 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 composer¹s heart
> and soul in the music he played.
>
> Gene Lees, Mr. Peterson¹s biographer, defended Mr. Peterson as ³a
> summational artist.²
>
> ³So was Mozart. So was Bach,² Mr. Lees wrote in his biography, ³The Will to
> Swing (1990). ³Bach and Mozart were both dealing with known vocabularies and
> an accepted body of aesthetic principles.² He noted that just as Bach used
> material that he first heard in Vivaldi. ³Oscar uses a curious spinning
> figure that he got from Dizzy Gillespie,² 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. Peterson¹s 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 son¹s 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 Oscar¹s
> older sister, Daisy.
>
> By his own account, Oscar believed he had become quite accomplished by age
> 14. Then heard a recording by Art Tatum.
>
> ³I gave up the piano for two solid months,² Mr. Peterson later recalled, and
> had ³crying fits at night² 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 ³Brown Bomber of
> Boogie-Woogie,² an allusion to the nickname of the boxer Joe Louis and also
> to Mr. Peterson¹s 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 band¹s 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
> Montreal¹s 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 ³Jazz at the Philharmonic²
> 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 magazine¹s reader¹s 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 ³The Canadiana Suite,² an extended work written for his
> home country; later, he wrote ³African Suite² and then ³A Royal Wedding
> Suite,² for the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. Verve and Pablo
> released most of Mr. Peterson¹s 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, ³I think I have a closeness with the instrument that
> I¹ve treasured over the years.² Before long he was back on tour and
> recording ³Side By Side² with Itzhak Perlman, having learned to do more
> playing with his right hand. As he told Down Beat in 1997: ³When I sit down
> to the piano, I don¹t want any scuffling. I want it to be a love affair.²
>
> Ben Ratliff contributed reporting.
>
>
>
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