August 15, 1925 (Montreal, Quebec, Canada)December 23, 2007
Two sentences about Oscar Peterson, both from people who knew what they were talking about.
Miles Davis, in a 1958 interview with Nat Hentoff, reacting to a particular Peterson performance: “Oscar makes me sick because he copies everybody. He even had to learn how to play the blues.” Herb Ellis, who spent five years sitting next to him: “I’ve never played with anybody who had more depth and more emotion and feeling in his playing.”
The Davis line is the most quoted sentence ever written about Peterson and it is almost always quoted alone, which is unfair to Davis as much as to Peterson. He was reacting to one specific track: the trio’s version of Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring”, from a live album shared with the Modern Jazz Quartet. And the criticism he actually made is a musical one, not an insult. It continues: “That’s not what Clifford meant. He passes right over what can be done with the chords.”
That is worth understanding, because Davis has a point. “Joy Spring” is not a blues; it is an AABA tune that moves through unusually distant key centres, and the improviser’s job is to thread them. Blues vocabulary stays in one key, so leaning on it is precisely the wrong tool for that tune. Davis is not saying Peterson cannot play. He is saying he reached for the wrong thing on this particular piece, and then over-generalised in the way musicians do about each other in print. Any page about Peterson that quotes only the second is a fan letter, and any page that quotes only the first is doing the lazy thing that a certain kind of jazz writing has done to him for sixty years. He is the most argued-about major pianist in the music, and the argument is genuinely interesting once you stop trying to win it.
Montreal
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was born in Montreal on 15 August 1925, into a family of West Indian descent in a working-class Black neighbourhood, and was taught first by his father and then by his sister Daisy. He began classical lessons at six. He won a talent contest at fourteen and was on weekly Montreal radio not long after. Between 1945 and 1949 he cut thirty-two sides for Victor in Montreal, on which you can hear a young player in love with boogie-woogie and with the lighter swing of Teddy Wilson and Nat King Cole — a style he would soon leave behind, and a technique that was already frightening.
This matters because of what it makes him: a fully formed conservatory-grade technician who arrived in American jazz from outside it, at twenty-four, carrying a classical foundation and a stride tradition that the bebop generation had deliberately walked away from.
There is one more formative event, and it is the one he told on himself. Played an Art Tatum record as a young man, he stopped. He told André Previn what happened next: “I gave up the piano for two solid months and had crying fits at night.” Every account of Peterson’s technique should start there rather than with the speed, because it explains the ambition. He did not set out to be fast. He set out to close a gap he had heard once and could not unhear, and the gap was Tatum.
Carnegie Hall, 1949, and the surprise that was not quite a surprise
Norman Granz heard him and put him on stage at Carnegie Hall on 18 September 1949, at a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert, in a duo with Ray Brown. The story always told is that he appeared as an unannounced surprise guest. That is true, and there is also a duller reason underneath it: because of union restrictions his appearance could not be billed at all. Both things happened. The romantic version and the bureaucratic version are the same evening.
What is not in dispute is the effect. Granz became his manager and producer for the rest of his working life, and Peterson went from being famous in Canada to being one of the most recorded musicians in jazz — more than two hundred releases, eight Grammy Awards, and thousands of concerts across a career of more than sixty years. Duke Ellington called him the Maharaja of the keyboard. His friends called him O.P.
The trios
The group everyone means by the Oscar Peterson Trio went through two configurations, and the difference between them is worth hearing.
From 1953 the front line was piano, guitar and bass — Peterson, Herb Ellis and Ray Brown, with no drummer. A trio with no drums puts the entire responsibility for time on three melody instruments, and it is the single best argument against the charge that Peterson could not swing without help. Ellis left late in 1958; rather than replace him with another guitarist, Peterson took on Ed Thigpen, and from 1959 the group was piano, bass and drums. Thigpen later described the group’s working attitude as a decision to play so well every night that even a bad night would be head and shoulders above everyone else.
Ray Brown stayed fifteen years. His verdict on what it took: Peterson threw curveballs, and if you were not good enough to handle that you should not have been on the bandstand.
What is actually happening in the hands
The technique argument gets made in adjectives. It is more useful in specifics.
He plays the piano as an orchestra, and the left hand is the section that does it. The dominant trend of his century ran toward economy in the left hand: Bud Powell popularised sparse shells, and Bill Evans standardised the rootless voicings that became the default for playing with a bassist. Peterson used those too, and kept the older and more demanding options alive beside them: a genuine stride left hand, walking bass lines played in full while the right hand solos over them, and a two-handed locked texture. The consequence is a player whose left hand is regularly carrying bass, harmony and time at once, which is unusual for his generation and is most of what people are hearing when they call his sound orchestral.
Locked hands, and what it actually is. The block-chord texture is a specific object rather than a general thickening. The version worth learning is the sixth-diminished system — the one codified and taught by Barry Harris rather than by Peterson, but the clearest available explanation of what this whole family of textures is doing. In that system the home chord supplies four tones in closed position, spanning no more than an octave, inverted so the melody note is on top, with both hands moving in the melody’s rhythm; where the melody note is not a chord tone, a diminished seventh supplies the four tones instead, and the two alternate up and down the scale.
The reason the alternation sounds inevitable is an identity worth knowing: a diminished seventh is also a rootless dominant seventh flat nine. B, D, F and A flat is B diminished seventh, and it is also the third, fifth, flat seventh and flat ninth of G7 flat nine. Note the qualifier that matters: that same four-note set is symmetrical, so it serves equally as a rootless B flat 7 flat nine, D flat 7 flat nine or E7 flat nine. Which dominant it is depends entirely on where the music is going. The shape does not tell you; the context does.
Where pianists differ inside that texture is the split between the hands. Peterson’s version is characteristically full — a good deal of the weight in both hands, in contrast to a thinner right hand over a fuller left. That is a choice with a cost and a benefit, and both are audible: enormous sound, less air.
Three things worth stealing, in ascending order of difficulty:
- Play a whole chorus with a walking bass in the left hand and nothing else. Quarter notes, roots and passing tones, no chords at all, while the right hand improvises. It is exhausting and it will fix your time faster than any metronome exercise.
- Learn one four-way close and its diminished passing chord in one key. Then move the melody note up a scale step at a time and let the texture follow. The alternation is the whole trick.
- Practise the same phrase at three tempos and keep the articulation identical. Peterson’s speed is not the interesting part; the interesting part is that nothing degrades when the tempo doubles. Every note keeps its attack. That is a control problem, not a velocity problem, and it is the actual reason other pianists were frightened of him.
Hymn to Freedom, and the part that is not about speed
In 1962 he wrote a piece called “Hymn to Freedom”. It came out the following year on Night Train, an album otherwise built from Ellington tunes and blues, and it became an anthem of the American civil rights movement. Harriette Hamilton later put words to it. It is a slow gospel-shaped thing in a songbook otherwise dominated by tempo, and it is the single strongest answer to the charge that he had nothing to say.
Two years later came Canadiana Suite, eight pieces each drawn from a different part of the country, including one named for the Montreal neighbourhood he grew up in. He described it as a musical portrait of the Canada he loved. Sources date it to 1963 and 1964 about equally often; the recording sessions belong to 1964.
Both records point at the same thing, which is easy to lose behind the virtuosity: he was a composer with a subject. Not a standards machine.
The school
The least-known thing about him is the one a page on a teaching site should say loudest. In 1960, when almost no formal jazz instruction existed anywhere, he opened one. The Advanced School of Contemporary Music was at 21 Park Road in Toronto, and the faculty was Peterson himself with Ray Brown, Ed Thigpen and the clarinettist Phil Nimmons — which is to say, his own working rhythm section teaching in the daytime.
The course ran four months. Students got private lessons, compulsory classroom theory and piano, group playing, improvisation sessions, and music appreciation lectures. It lasted until 1964 and then closed, for the two reasons small good things usually close: the faculty were touring musicians and the touring called them away, and there was no government money.
He kept at the teaching anyway. He mentored the jazz programme at York University and served as the university’s chancellor in the 1990s, and he published his own jazz piano exercises. Benny Green and Oliver Jones both studied with him.
The argument, taken seriously
The criticism that followed him is consistent enough to state fairly: that the virtuosity masks a lack of feeling, that he did not evolve after the 1950s, that he plays a hundred notes where ten would do, and that he recorded far too much. A reviewer in the French magazine Le Jazz Hot wrote in 1969 that Peterson had all the requisites of a great jazz musician except the poetry and the profound sense of the blues that made the grandeur of an Armstrong or a Parker.
Some of that is simply true and not a criticism. He recorded enormously because his producer recorded him enormously. He did not change his style after it was formed, which is also true of Monk and of Johnny Hodges and is a legitimate way to have a career.
The hundred-notes charge is the interesting one, and the fair answer is that the hundred notes usually fit. Dan Morgenstern’s comparison is to the complaint that Mozart wrote too many notes: displays of facility for their own sake are shallow, but that is not what is happening here, and the sheer pleasure Peterson takes in it is part of the content rather than a distraction from it.
The charge of coldness is the one worth resisting hardest, and Peterson answered it himself when a DownBeat interviewer put a critic’s cold-machine line to him: “So sue me. I am the kind of piano player I am. I want to address the keyboard in a certain way. I want to be able to do anything my mind tells me to do.”
That is not a defence. It is a description of an aesthetic position, and it is the same one every virtuoso in every tradition has held: capability first, because you cannot express what you cannot execute. You are allowed to prefer the opposite position. You are not entitled to pretend Peterson had not thought about it.
Nor is he vague on the subject elsewhere. On what technique is for: it is what you use to make your ideas listenable, and you practise to get it to the point where it can carry however heavy your ideas happen to be.
1993
He had arthritis from his youth and mobility problems for years. Then, in 1993, while playing at the Blue Note in New York, he noticed numbness in his left hand. It was a stroke, and it took his left side.
He stopped for two years and was badly depressed by it. He told an interviewer that on the first day he sat at the piano with his therapist, he had tears in his eyes. Other musicians pushed him back: the bassist Dave Young simply turned up at the house with his instrument and refused the excuse.
He returned to limited public performance in 1995 and recorded for Telarc, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. What he came back as is worth stating precisely rather than heroically. He recovered some dexterity in the left hand and it kept a residual role, supplying accents and single notes, but it never again did the work it had done, and his playing from then on relied principally on the right. DownBeat’s John McDonough sat through several post-stroke concerts before noticing how little the left hand was doing, because the right was doing so much. His friend Bob Rae’s line has stuck, and it is worth taking as the affectionate assessment of a friend rather than a measurement: a one-handed Oscar, he said, was better than just about anyone with two hands.
None of which is a moral about adversity, and it should not be made to carry one.
Canada Post put him on a stamp for his eightieth birthday in 2005. He died at home in Mississauga, Ontario on 23 December 2007, of kidney failure, aged eighty-two.
What is documented and what is a story
Two corrections to our own app, both small and both worth making.
The app used to say the 1993 stroke paralyzed his left hand and that he retrained himself to play again. The second half implied a recovery that did not happen: he regained some movement and some limited use, but never his former left-hand playing, and the career he rebuilt ran principally on the right hand. That entry has been rewritten in the same change as this page.
The app also used to credit Herbie Hancock with saying that watching Peterson made him want to quit the piano. We could not source it, and it looks like a migrated version of a story very well documented about somebody else: Peterson himself, on first hearing Art Tatum. That line has been removed rather than repaired, because an unsourced quotation attributed to a living musician is the worst kind to leave standing.
And the Miles Davis quote deserves its context. The pull quote at the top of this page is real and comes from a 1958 interview with Nat Hentoff. The passage it sits in is longer and rather more specific than the sentence suggests, which is what usually happens to a quotable insult. We have used it because it is the strongest version of a serious criticism, not because it is the last word.
Where to start, honestly
Night Train first, because it is short, blues-centred, and the least overwhelming route into what the trio actually did together. Then the Chicago live trio record for what that band sounded like with an audience in front of it. Then We Get Requests for the ballads, which is where people who think they have Peterson’s number tend to be surprised.
Then, if you want the argument settled for yourself rather than by a critic, put a mid-1990s record next to a mid-1960s one and listen to what the left hand is and is not doing in each.
Start with these records
- Night Train 1963
Blues, swing, and bebop at its finest. The title track grooves so hard! Perfect introduction to Oscar's accessible side. - We Get Requests 1965
Beautiful ballad playing alongside up-tempo burners. Features 'You Look Good to Me' and 'People.' Shows his tender side. - The Trio (Live from Chicago) 1961
Live recording capturing the magic of Peterson-Brown-Thigpen. The energy is electrifying. Hear them interact in real time! - Exclusively for My Friends 1968
Series of intimate solo recordings. Hear Oscar without the trio, showing his complete pianistic conception.
How to listen
- If you are starting out
- 'Hymn to Freedom' - accessible, grooving, and powerful. Then 'C Jam Blues' - pure fun!
- If you can already comp through a standard
- 'Night Train' full album. Notice his left-hand stride patterns and right-hand bebop lines working together.
- If you are transcribing
- Transcribe his solo on 'Blues Etude.' Analyze his harmonic substitutions and finger patterns. Prepare to be humbled!
Sources
Every date, title and quotation on this page is checked against at least two independent sources before it builds. Where sources disagree, the page says so instead of picking the better story.
- Oscar PetersonCanadian Songwriters Hall of Fame
- Canadian jazz great Oscar Peterson diesCBC News
- Notes on the Method of Barry HarrisCEA-Irfu (F. Galliano)
- Barry Harris's Sixth Diminished ScaleCochrane Music
- Oscar Peterson artist pageConcord Music Group
- Oscar Peterson biography research starterEBSCO
- TT 541: Oscar Peterson CentennialEthan Iverson
- Oscar Peterson discographyJazz Discography Project
- An Afternoon with Miles Davis, The Jazz Review Vol.1 No.2, December 1958Jazz Studies Online (Columbia University)
- Oscar Peterson: Bursting OutJazzProfiles
- Art Tatum: Tatum ArtJazzTimes
- The Classic Oscar Peterson Trio Studio Sessions with Ray Brown and Ed ThigpenMosaic Records
- Art Tatum, Vladimir Horowitz, and Other GreatsNational Review
- Oscar Peterson's pioneering Toronto jazz schoolNicholas Jennings
- Pianist Profiles: Oscar Peterson's Jazz LegacyPianote
- Return of a VirtuosoSmithsonian Magazine
- The Oscar Peterson TrioTheAudioDB
- Oscar PetersonWikipedia