Canadian jazz legend Oscar Peterson dies
24/12/2007 2:40:25 PM
Internationally renowned Canadian jazz pianist and trumpet player Oscar Peterson has died.
Oscar Peterson performs in concert at the Montreal International Jazz Festival in this July 7, 1983 file photo. (Marc Miller / THE CANADIAN PRESS)
The 82-year-old died at his Mississauga, Ont. home on Sunday from kidney failure and other complications following a stroke several years ago, sources have confirmed.
Veteran politician Bob Rae — a close family friend of Peterson — told CTV that he heard the news from Peterson’s wife Kelly Sunday night.
“I’d been over to visit a couple of weeks ago. He’d been okay, but he was obviously failing,” Rae said on Monday. “It was not quite the Oscar we’d all come to know and love.”
Rae said that while the news did not come as a shock it was a great loss to the nation.
“He’s probably Canada’s best-known citizen internationally. No Canadian has done more in the cultural musical field than Oscar, and really as a humanitarian and a fighter for civil rights,” he said.
According to his website, Oscarpeterson.com, he was the fourth of five children born to parents Daniel and Kathleen. Peterson was born in 1925.
He began playing music when he was five, first under the tutelage of his father, a porter with Canadian Pacific Railways who was also a self-taught piano player, then later under the guidance of Paul de Marky, a respected classical pianist from Hungary.
Peterson’s introduction to jazz music also came at an early age. Growing up in Montreal’s poor, predominantly black Little Burgundy neighbourhood in the 1920s and ’30s, he was surrounded by a then flourishing jazz culture that came to define his long career.
His influences are said to be Teddy Williams, Nat King Cole and Art Tatum.
Peterson’s first national exposure in Canada came when he was 14, when his older sister Daisy arranged for him to audition for a national amateur competition. He went on to win the contest.
Oliver Jones — a friend of Peterson’s since childhood — said people could tell Peterson was destined for big things from an early age.
“He had this aura . . . we just knew he was slated for greatness,” Jones told CTV Newsnet from his home in Deerfield Beach, Fla.
“I don’t believe we ever knew just how much of an impact he would have on the world scene.”
Known as a virtuoso piano improviser, Peterson was described in a 1975 Maclean’s article as the “Best Damn Jazz Piano” player in the world.
On top of his technical and musical brilliance, Peterson was known for his left hand dexterity — his ability to spin creative, complex and clear streams of notes effortlessly with his accompanying hand.
It was also his left side, however that was weakened when he suffered a serious stroke in 1993. He never recovered fully, but played on a limited basis several years later until his death.
Liberal Leader Stephane Dion issued a statement on Monday, expressing his condolences to the family of the man he said was “one of the greatest pianists and composers the jazz community has known.”
“I would like to express my deepest sympathies to Mr. Peterson’s family and friends. I share in the grief of the millions of fans with whom Oscar Peterson shared the tremendous gift of his remarkable music,” Dion said in the statement.
Among the many awards Peterson collected during his 50-year career, he received eight Grammys, the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement and was a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Jones, a piano player himself, described Peterson as the epitome of “a complete musician.”
Jones said he knew what he wanted to do and was determined to be the best jazz pianist – not an easy task for a young black man growing up in Canada during the 30s and 40s.
“I’m thankful that he passed away at home with his family, apparently very peacefully and with dignity,” Jones said.
Oscar Peterson dies at 82
Dec 24, 2007 02:19 PM
Angela Pacienza
THE CANADIAN PRESS
KAZUYOSHI EHARA/TORONTO STAR
Oscar Peterson during a ceremony honouring his achievements in June, 2004
–> Oscar Peterson photo gallery
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Oscar Peterson
Born: Montreal, Aug. 15, 1925.
Parents: Daniel and Kathleen, both immigrated to Canada from the West Indies in 1917.
Family: Married four times. Leaves behind wife Kelly, daughter Celine.
Beginnings: Started playing trumpet and piano at age 5. At year later contracted tuberculosis which damaged his lungs so he could no longer play trumpet. Focused on piano.
Co-workers: Has played with and befriended many jazz greats including Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker.
Quote: “It makes you want to sing.” — Ella Fitzgerald, at 74, about Peterson’s piano work.
Musical luminaries expressed shocked condolences and shared fond memories Monday after hearing reports that jazz great Oscar Peterson had died at age 82.
“What can you say about playing with somebody who was such a giant, who made such a huge contribution to jazz piano?” asked jazz guitarist Lorne Lofsky, who worked with Peterson off and on in the 1980s and 1990s, and was part of his quartet that played Carnegie Hall and toured Europe.
“It was very challenging to play with him in many different ways,” Lofsky said in an interview from Newmarket, Ont.
“You know, I learned a lot from playing with him and it was great, what I would call on-the-job training … playing in a situation like that where you never know what’s going to happen from one moment to the next.”
CBC said Peterson died at his home of kidney failure.
Tracy Biddle, whose late father Charles was a close friend of Peterson’s and a pillar of the Montreal jazz community, was floored when she heard the news.
“He really put Montreal on the map of jazz,” Biddle said in an interview in Montreal. “I believe that on a grander scale, the impact he had on the black community and on the whole musical community was huge.”
“He broke out of Canada. He’s one of the first people. We talk of Celine Dion and Shania Twain and Alanis Morissette and Bryan Adams. Oscar Peterson did what they did years ago as a black person. So what he’s done is incredible.”
Gene Lees, Canadian jazz journalist and lyricist and author of the Peterson biography The Will to Swing, called the pianist a “summational, towering, figure.”
“He was one of the most amazing musicians I’ve ever heard in my life,” Lees said from Ojai, Calif. “I don’t think there’s ever been a pianist in jazz of the later generation who wasn’t influenced by him.”
“Somebody once said that (Franz) Lizst conquered the piano and Chopin seduced it. Oscar is our Lizst.”
The keyboard titan, who recorded almost 200 albums, played alongside the greats of the jazz world: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald.
“It makes you want to sing,” the late Fitzgerald once said of Peterson’s piano work.
Peterson’s style, somewhere between swing and bop, was considered technically dazzling, keenly aware of the roots of jazz and fearless in its improvisational scope. While some critics said he used too many notes in his music, others said the 100-plus notes allowed for a dazzling work of art.
“There’s an extreme joy I get in playing that I’ve never been able to explain,” Peterson said in a 1996 interview. “I can only transmit it through the playing; I can’t put it into words.”
Throughout his life, Peterson was showered with awards, honorary degrees and national honours.
He collected eight Grammys, including a lifetime achievement award in 1997, hundreds of prizes from the jazz community, the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement and was a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2005 Canada Post marked his contribution to music with a 50-cent stamp.
He was set to be honoured again next month in Toronto.
The world-renowned pianist toured extensively during his career, bringing his easy-swinging sounds to virtually every major concert hall around the globe, and recording some of the country’s most distinctive music including “Canadiana Suite” and “Hymn to Freedom.”
Peterson was frequently invited to perform for various luminaries including the Queen and U.S. President Richard Nixon.
“The piano is like an extension of his own physical being,” composer Phil Nimmons, who helped create “Canadiana Suite,” said in 1975 of his longtime friend.
“I’m amazed at the speed of his creativity. I am not talking about mere technical capabilities, although his are awesome. I’m speaking of the times when you find him under optimum conditions of creativity. His mind can move as quickly as his fingers and that is what is so astounding.”
Peterson began playing the piano and trumpet as a young boy under the stern tutelage of his father, Daniel Peterson, a West Indian immigrant who worked as a railway porter.
He continued with his piano studies under the watch of his older sister Daisy after tuberculosis damaged his lungs at age six.
At 14, Peterson earned his first break, winning the CBC’s national amateur contest (and $250). With his father’s permission, Peterson dropped out of school to focus on his budding career.
As the only black member of a dance band, he was frequently subjected to the racism of the decade. One of the first black artists to achieve prominence in the white-dominated music industry of the 1950s, Peterson spent a great deal of his life acting as a spokesman for minority rights, drawing on his experiences growing up in the impoverished St. Antoine district of Montreal.
The manager of Montreal’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel once phoned band leader Johnny Holmes two days before a big event to declare that blacks weren’t welcome in the hotel. The manager eventually backed down after Holmes threatened to put a notice in local newspapers saying the hotel barred blacks.
“In all the years that Oscar and I have been friends, he’d never really lamented or even discussed the discrimination that he suffered as a child and as a young man,” said Gene Lees, a longtime friend of Peterson’s who also penned the musician’s biography, The Will to Swing. “(It’s) a magnificent triumph of the human spirit.”
International exposure came in 1948 when Norman Granz, producer of Jazz at the Philharmonic, heard Peterson on Montreal radio and later invited the 24-year-old to New York to play as a surprise guest at the prestigious Carnegie Hall. After the performance, the young talent joined the troupe and toured North America with them for two years.
Peterson, whose career was managed by Granz for over 30 years, formed a trio in 1951 with Ray Brown on bass and Charlie Smith on drums and continued playing with the prestigious group.
His most famous threesome was with Herb Ellis and Ray Brown who were often cited as one of the world’s finest jazz combos.
“You saw the greatness immediately,” Ellis once said of Peterson. “He was awesome right away – always.”
Although Peterson was one of Canada’s leading artistic exports, he was frequently mistaken as an American because of his Jazz at the Philharmonic performances.
“I’ve achieved a funny kind of status in Canada,” he once said. “Most of it comes because I went to the United States and other places, and as a result of Canadians having seen me repeatedly on the television shows of people like Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin … I think that has weighed heavily with Canadians.”
But he loved his home country and had lived in Mississauga since the late 1950s.
He was also well known for his kindness towards young artists, having tutored many an aspiring pianist.
Diana Krall credits Peterson for prompting her to pursue a musical career after catching one of his concerts as a young girl.
“You inspire me to no end every day,” she told him in 2005 during a ceremony unveiling a Canada Post stamp in his honour.
In his efforts to coach youth, Peterson helped open Toronto’s Advanced School of Contemporary Music in 1960 only to see his beloved project fail due to financial difficulties three years later. He didn’t give up, serving as an adjunct music professor at York University in the mid-1980s and as its chancellor in the early 1990s.
Arthritis became a problem for the charming musician in the 1980s, causing him some pain in his hands and difficulty in walking yet he never seemed to slow down.
In 1993, at 68, he suffered a stroke which incapacitated his left hand. Peterson recovered and resumed performing two years later.
He then released A Summer Night in Munich, a live recording of old and new material; an instructional CD-ROM; and Trail of Dreams, a musical portrait of Canada commemorating the Trans Canada Trail.
“Age doesn’t seem to enter into my thought to that great an extent,” he said in 2001. “I just figure that the love I have of the instrument and my group and the medium itself works as a sort of a rejuvenating factor for me.”
Peterson leaves behind wife, Kelly, and their daughter Celine.
