God’s Wings

A little something to put things in perspective…
After a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park , forest rangers
began their trek up a mountain to assess the inferno’s damage.

One ranger found a bird literally petrified in ashes, perched
statuesquely on the ground at the base of a tree. Somewhat
sickened by the eerie sight, he knocked over the bird with a stick.

When he gently struck it, three tiny chicks scurried from under
their dead mother’s wings. The loving mother, keenly aware of
impending disaster, had carried her offspring to the base of the
tree and had gathered them under her wings, instinctively knowing
that the toxic smoke would rise.

She could have flown to safety but had refused to abandon her
babies. Then the blaze had arrived and the heat had scorched her
small body, the mother had remained steadfast …because she had
been willing to die, so those under the cover of her wings would live.

‘He will cover you with His feathers,
And under His wings you will find refuge.’
(Psalm 91:4)

Being loved this much should make a difference in your life.
Remember the One who loves you, and then be different because of it.
Time waits for no one. Treasure every moment you have. You will
treasure it even more when you can share it with someone special.
To realize the value of a friend…lose one.

by Walter Watson

Alexander Joe

Graca Machel, activist and wife of Nelson Mandela (right) speaks at a Nov. 24 joint news conference in Johannesburg addressing the growing power-sharing and cholera crisis in Zimbabwe. She is joined by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. AFP

NPR.org, December 9, 2008

The Elders, a group founded in 2007, is made up of a dozen former world leaders working behind the scenes and in plain sight to stem the spread of conflicts, poverty and human rights issues. The organization started as an idea by musician Peter Gabriel.

Gabriel shared his idea with entrepreneur Richard Branson back in 1999 with the thought of forming a group that could work in much the same way as respected elders of an African village, sharing wisdom and solutions with a community that could be moved to positive outcomes.

The founding roster for "The Elders" includes:

• Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa

• Graca Machel, former first lady of Mozambique, activist for women’s and children’s rights, and Mandela’s wife

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa

• Jimmy Carter, former U.S. president responsible for the 1978 Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt

• Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights

• Lakhdar Brahimi, former Algerian diplomat

• Muhammad Yunus, economist and founder of the Grameen Bank

• Fernando Cardoso, former president of Brazil

• Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations

• Aung San Suu Kyi, pro-democracy activist and the prime minister-elect of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), unrecognized winner of the 1990 Burma election

• Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a trade union with more than 1 million members in India

• Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and former director general of the World Health Organization

Members of the Elders have traveled to Kenya, Sudan, Cyprus and most recently to South Africa to evaluate the humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe and attempt to reach resolution through unconventional means.

Several of the founding members of the Elders are recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dancing All the Dances as Long as I Can

by Robert Fulghum

Miro Svolik

Robert Fulghum has written seven bestsellers including All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. A native of Waco, Texas, he was a Unitarian minister for 22 years and taught painting and philosophy. Fulghum lives in Seattle and Crete.

“My passion for tango disguises a fearfulness. I fear the shrinking of life that goes with aging.”

 

Weekend Edition Sunday, October 28, 2007 · I believe in dancing.

I believe it is in my nature to dance by virtue of the beat of my heart, the pulse of my blood and the music in my mind. So I dance daily.

The seldom-used dining room of my house is now an often-used ballroom — an open space with a hardwood floor, stereo and a disco ball. The CD-changer has six discs at the ready: waltz, swing, country, rock ‘n’ roll, salsa and tango.

Each morning when I walk through the house on the way to make coffee, I turn on the music, hit the "shuffle" button and it’s Dance Time! I dance alone to whatever is playing. It’s a form of existential aerobics, a moving meditation.

Tango is a recent enthusiasm. It’s a complex and difficult dance, so I’m up to three lessons a week, three nights out dancing, and I’m off to Buenos Aires for three months of immersion in tango culture.

The first time I went tango dancing I was too intimidated to get out on the floor. I remembered another time I had stayed on the sidelines, when the dancing began after a village wedding on the Greek island of Crete. The fancy footwork confused me. "Don’t make a fool of yourself," I thought. "Just watch."

Reading my mind, an older woman dropped out of the dance, sat down beside me, and said, "If you join the dancing, you will feel foolish. If you do not, you will also feel foolish. So, why not dance?"

And, she said she had a secret for me. She whispered, "If you do not dance, we will know you are a fool. But if you dance, we will think well of you for trying."

Recalling her wise words, I took up the challenge of tango.

A friend asked me if my tango-mania wasn’t a little ambitious. "Tango? At your age? You must be out of your mind!"

On the contrary: It’s a deeply pondered decision. My passion for tango disguises a fearfulness. I fear the shrinking of life that goes with aging. I fear the boredom that comes with not learning and not taking chances. I fear the dying that goes on inside you when you leave the game of life to wait in the final checkout line.

I seek the sharp, scary pleasure that comes from beginning something new — that calls on all my resources and challenges my mind, my body and my spirit, all at once.

My goal now is to dance all the dances as long as I can, and then to sit down contented after the last elegant tango some sweet night and pass on because there wasn’t another dance left in me.

So, when people say, "Tango? At your age? Have lost your mind?" I answer,

"No, and I don’t intend to."

Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

More ‘This I Believe’ Stories

• Brian Grazer: Disrupting My Comfort Zone
• David Greenberger: As I Grow Old
• Martha Graham: An Athlete of God

Music Makes Me Come Alive

by Joan Tower

Noah Sheldon

Composer and pianist Joan Tower was born in New York and spent her youth in Bolivia where her father worked as a mining engineer. Her most famous works include "Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman" and the tone poem "Sequoia." Tower teaches at Bard College. Noah Sheldon Photography

“When I was growing up, my life largely centered around boys and sex… now, I can say, without music I would be lost.”

All Things Considered, November 27, 2006 · After 60 plus years of composing and performing, I believe more than ever in the extraordinary power of music.

In this day of fast information and communication, music nourishes our inner souls. As tensions between nations continue, music reaches beyond borders. At weddings, funerals, inaugurations and parades, music gives us public permission to feel and share things. In fact, music has always been a shared thing — between the creator, the performer and the audience. Music connects me to people I don’t even know.

Strong music puts you in a space where you forget about yourself. It’s like a good movie. It’s an escape. You lose yourself. It’s a license to feel, sing, shout and to dance.

Do you remember when you first fell in love? Was there a song associated with that love? When you hear that song now, don’t you think of that person and actually remember what you felt? Maybe you even cry.

When I was growing up, my life largely centered around boys and sex. I was into music, but music didn’t always give me the nourishment that boys did. It takes time and patience to be nourished by music. Now, I can say, without music I would be lost.

A conductor once told me that music had kept him off the streets and even out of jail. Music became a kind of "survival" phenomena for him (and for me, too). It is our drug of choice because it has given us the extraordinary lasting inner experience that has even replaced real drugs, vacations, money, fame and all the things we associate with pleasure and excitement. A friend of mine who happens to be an extraordinary pianist and still practices up to five hours a day once said to me, "The piano is my best friend. I can’t think of anyone better to spend my time with."

I feel the same way about composing. I’m in the studio from 1:00 to 5:30 religiously, every day. I used to run from the studio — I’d tell myself I had to clean or make a telephone call, anything to get out of there. Now I look forward to these hours.

Music is not just my most trusted friend. It makes me come alive, to show strength and passion and to feel useful. Music makes me feel like I’m doing something terribly important. I believe that with music I can help to change the world around me — if just a little bit.

Related NPR Stories

• Oct. 19, 2005

  Small Orchestras Debut Joan Tower Piece

More ‘This I Believe’ Essays

• Sep. 25, 2006

  Bela Fleck: Doing Things My Own Way

• Feb. 6, 2006

  Mel Rusnov: The Artistry in Hidden Talents

• June 19, 2006

  Loudon Wainwright III: How Do You Believe in a Mystery?

by Steve Banko

Photo Courtesy of Steve Banko

Steve Banko did two combat tours in Vietnam, earning the Silver Star and four Purple Hearts. In 1996, he received the Terry Anderson Courage to Comeback Award for his struggles with alcoholism and depression. Banko is a 30-year civil servant in Buffalo, N.Y.

“I believe there is magic in Christmas and the music that celebrates it, because it brings us closer together and closer to our own hearts.”

 

Weekend Edition Sunday, December 23, 2007 · I’ve been moved by the magic of Christmas music since the nuns in grammar school etched the words of the carols into my brain. That magic persists despite the memory of our pre-pubescent male voices that sounded more like a pond of bullfrogs than the Vienna Boys Choir. The music rose above us. Even our childhood rivalries and petty differences were no match for the spell of that music. I believe that Christmas music can touch the spirit.

Those nuns taught me the music and the lyrics, but I would learn of the real magic about 10 years later.

On Christmas Eve 1968, I was a patient in a military hospital in Yokota, Japan. My leg had been shattered by a couple of machine gun bullets in a five-hour battle in Vietnam. My body was full of shrapnel and my hands had been badly burned. For three weeks, Army doctors in Vietnam struggled to save my leg. They sent me to Japan on that Christmas Eve to give a new team of surgeons a chance to work their magic.

And I was in desperate need of magic. Somewhere it was Christmas but it didn’t feel like it to me — at least not until I heard the music piped through the PA system.

A chorus sang of "peace on earth and mercy mild" and promised "God and sinners reconciled." Another voice called to "let us all with one accord sing praises to our heavenly Lord" and another, to "sleep in heavenly peace" but heaven and peace seemed so distant to me.

My misery was interrupted by a low moan coming from the next bed. All I could see was a white cast shaped like a body; cutouts for his eyes, nose and mouth were the only breaks in the cast. Even as the music inched me toward comfort, the reality of pain anchored me in the present. But looking at my neighbor enclosed in God-knows-what-kind-of-pain, mine didn’t seem nearly as important.

The soft strains of "Silent Night" were filling the air of the ward when the nurses made final rounds with our medications. When my nurse approached, I asked her to push my bed closer to the man in the cast. I reached out and took my new friend’s hand as the carol told us "all is calm, all is bright."

We spoke no words to each other. None were needed. The carol revived the message of hope and the triumph of love for me. I felt a slight tightening on my hand and for the first time that Christmas I felt I would survive my ordeal, and for the first time in a long time, I wanted to.

I believe there is magic in Christmas and the music that celebrates it, because it brings us closer together and closer to our own hearts.

Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

More ‘This I Believe’ Essays

• Joan Tower: Music Makes Me Come Alive
• Miles Goodwin: The Connection Between Strangers
• Colleen Shaddox: Jazz Is the Sound of God Laughing

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language rather than German which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phased-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the second year when the troublesome “ph” will be replased with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3^rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4^th yer people wil be resptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords containing “ou” and after ziz fifz yer , ve vil hav a rel sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem of a united Urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German lik zey vunted in ze forst plas.

If zis mad yu smil, ples pas on to ozer pepl.

Weekend Edition Sunday, November 16, 2008 – Tod Machover’s goal is to put music into the hands of people who want to play it — or at least imagine it.

Video game fans may have spent some time with something Machover and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology helped to develop — Guitar Hero.

In the early 1980s, Machover was director of musical research at IRCAM, a music research institute. Since 1985, the American musician and composer has been at the forefront of music and technology as a professor at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass. Machover says a lot has changed since his days at IRCAM: Now, anyone can access cutting-edge technology.

"The idea that you could make a new kind of instrument that would use the gestures you were most natural and familiar with, and the fact that that would lead to a set of instruments that would let anyone have fun with music makes a lot of sense," he says.

Instruments With Built-In Technology

Machover first began working on what he calls "hyperinstruments" at MIT in 1986. The most famous is probably the hypercello he created for Yo-Yo Ma.

"The basic idea of a hyperinstrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how it’s being played — literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is," Machover says. "If a performer pushed to a downbeat or relaxed on a phrase or brought out a particular F-sharp, those things would be recognized and valued by the instrument."

For Yo-Yo Ma’s hypercello, Machover placed sensors on the instrument, the performer’s wrist and his bow and fed the electronic impulses generated by those sensors into a computer. It took the signals and responded to the cellist’s playing — sometimes transforming the sound, and sometimes creating new sounds.

Machover is a cellist himself. He started playing as a child, and from the beginning he was interested in modern classical music — and rock. He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at Columbia and the Juilliard School of Music in New York — where his mentors included the late Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, who is still composing and will celebrate his 100th birthday next month.

Machover admits his approach to music isn’t for everyone. He hopes his hyperinstruments will be adopted by more soloists. But he says at least one school has seized on the idea.

"The Royal Academy of Music in London got interested in hyperinstruments and particularly in stringed hyperinstruments," Machover says. "So we’ve worked with them for the past few years to bring a set of these instruments into the center of their curriculum. And that’s a wonderful way for these kinds of instruments to get into [the hands of] soloists, chamber musicians and orchestras."

Music, Mind And Health

"Music, Mind and Health" is the name of one of Machover’s latest projects. He and his team at the MIT Media Lab were contacted by the Massachusetts Cultural Council to see if they were interested in working at a hospital in Tewksbury, north of Boston.

"Our initial work was with people who were long-term residents at this hospital and, generally, people with no experience in music," Machover says.

One person Machover’s team worked with was Dan Ellsey, a man in his early 30s with severe cerebral palsy. Bound to a wheelchair, Ellsey has very limited movement, and communicates with a talking box that he controls through an infrared controller worn in a headband.

"One of my students made an interface so Dan [Ellsey] could use his head movements and the infrared controller on his head to actually draw the lines and colors that we use for our Hyperscore software. He wrote a piece that was transcribed for symphony orchestra and is absolutely dynamite."

Machover’s student used the same controller on the young man’s head to create a hyperinstrument that understands the movements he can make and compensates for movements that are difficult for him.

"He changes the sound of the piece; he changes the emphasis; he changes the texture; he changes the accents; he changes the color of the piece," Machover says. "When he’s playing the piece, he’s a different person."

The Future Of Music

Machover does all of this work — his research, teaching and outreach — while still pursuing an active career as a composer. His work has been commissioned or performed by Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain, the London Sinfonietta, Speculum Musicae, the San Francisco Symphony, Houston Grand Opera, Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma and others. He has written or edited four books; seen two operas premiered; and composed more than 25 orchestral, chamber and electronic works. Two new operas will premiere in the next few months.

So, what about Guitar Hero? Machover sees in it the future of music.

"Imagine if [Guitar Hero] were truly expressive, truly personal, truly creative. The wonderful thing about Guitar Hero is that it opens up the door for everybody to be not just a passive listener but a real active participant in music," Machover says. "I think that is the future of music: music that is a collaboration between what we traditionally think of as composers and performers and the audience."

Related NPR Stories

• Nov. 16, 2008

  IRCAM: The Quiet House Of Sound

• May. 17, 2003

  An MIT Prof’s Toy Symphony Project

By Christian Bordal

Listen Now [7 min 20 sec]

Whynn Lewis

Vashti Bunyan’s latest album is titled Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind: Singles and Demos 1964 to 1967.

Hear the Songs

‘Train Song’

‘Winter Is Blue’

Courtesy of the artist

Vashti Bunyan in London, photographed early in her music career.

Day to Day, October 24, 2008 – Back in the mid-’60s, Andrew Oldham, manager of The Rolling Stones, saw something promising in a quiet young singer-songwriter named Vashti Bunyan. So he brought her into the studio to record a single called "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind," written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Oldham himself presided over the session.

"Oh, yeah, he was there," Bunyan says. "Mick Jagger was there. Everybody was there. But nobody really spoke to me, and I certainly didn’t speak to anybody. I was way too shy."

Bunyan says she’s always been shy.

"Though I had a huge ego about my songs," she says. "I thought these were great and everybody should listen to these. But as a person, I had no way of persuading anybody. I was just way too shy and pretty much merged with the wallpaper, I think."

Bunyan’s shyness comes through in her soft, tentative singing. She says that, despite years spent trying to overcome it, singing more strongly just doesn’t suit her.

She spent three years recording demos and singles with Oldham and others, but in spite of her own great expectations, she made little headway. In 1967, she says, she decided that she’d had enough.

But if Bunyan’s arrival on the London music scene had caused little fanfare, the method of her departure three years later did raise some eyebrows — if only those of her parents. Bunyan had been living with her boyfriend in the woods behind his art school, but they were kicked out. So they decided to move to Scotland, via an antiquated form of transport.

As she and her boyfriend made their slow pilgrimage to Scotland by horse and cart — "Horses don’t need petrol," she says — Bunyan says she decided she was done with recording, though she continued to write new songs.

But a chance meeting with the well-known folk-music producer Joe Boyd convinced her to go back into the studio once more, if only to document her journey and record her new songs.

The result was Just Another Diamond Day — an album that, much like her earlier efforts, hardly caused a ripple in the pop-music marketplace.

"People dismissed it as nursery rhymes for children and being very insignificant," Bunyan says. "And I just thought, ‘Oh, well, I’ve made another mistake. They must be right. It must be rubbish. I’ll never pick up a guitar again. So I didn’t."

And she didn’t.

"It was like taking a whole part of myself and putting it in a cupboard and putting a padlock on it," she says. "It was painful."

Instead, Bunyan spent the next 30 years raising a family and farm animals in rural Scotland.

Then, a few years ago, while surfing the Web, Bunyan says she was amazed to find that the music she’d given up for good was actually alive and well. In fact, Just Another Diamond Day and other early recordings were becoming cult classics to a new generation of musicians, and in 2004, that album was reissued. In 2005, Bunyan released her first batch of new songs in 35 years on a thoughtful, bittersweet album called Lookaftering.

"When I first got on the Internet and realized that Diamond Day hadn’t just disappeared off the face of the earth and that people were still listening to the songs, it made me able to pick up my guitar again and get some kind of meaning back from it for myself," she says.

Bunyan says she’s still shy and still bedeviled by issues of self-confidence. But, more than 40 years after she took her first tentative steps down the path toward a musical life, she’s now finally leading it. She set up a small home studio, and, with no more children in the house, is hard at work on her next batch of quiet, carefully crafted little folk-pop poems.

"I’m writing about more particular things: more particular emotions and relationships," she says. "I’m just trying to dig a little deeper, maybe? But I’ve only got five songs so far. So it’s kind of hard to tell."

Heath Ledger, CPImages

Heath Ledger’s tragic miserable death took us by surprise.  He has taken the first step to Movie Star Immortality. 

Ledger follows the lead of other Immortals before him. He was an unusually handsome young man working his way up the H’wood totem pole while at the same time, fearing fame.  He may have been too sensitive for life as a public figure, if you believe what you hear. Ironically, his death ensures fame.

Ledger’s autopsy results are inconclusive, but some people have made up their minds that he died for love, heartbroken over his split from Michelle Williams, intentionally overdosing on prescription drugs.  [His family has denied his death was intentional.]

Each time a celeb dies ‘before his time’ we get a taste for them and devour them.

We pry into the most private details of their lives. Who could have known that Ledger was allegedly as lonely and as troubled as he was. Well, we sure do now because there are armies of professionals out there digging for news, no matter how inconsequential, hurtful or litigious.

The Timeline of Heath’s death! The Pills in His Home! Sleeplessness, prescription drug use and pneumonia! It was suicide! It was not suicide! The housekeeper was 56!  Here’s how his mourning ex girlfriend and daughter looked at the airport in Sweden!  And here in front of their onetime Brooklyn love nest! Here’s who he was dating…we think!

It’s all too much and yet who can look away?

Online and citizen reporting have redefined the celebrity news game. Streams of misinformation, speculation and assumptions are delivered as fact, in a race to post the story first.  There’s no time to prepare, vet and confirm stories. Turns out pills were not strewn around Ledger’s body and there were no traces of drugs on that rolled up twenty.

Immortals exit to hysteria. Stories of fan copycat suicides (that date back to Valentino) blare as shots of sidewalk memorials open and close each TV news story. Surprise and shock give way to melodrama.

Already they’re saying that Ledger‘s upcoming performance as The Joker in Dark Knight is the Performance of the Year.  Just days ago, New York and London tabs dismissed the heartthrob as appearing ‘homeless’, ‘scruffy’ and ‘pathetic’.

That‘s nothing new. Young actors, male and female, the good-looking ones, find not just immortality but infallibility in death.  Suddenly, they are The Best of Their Generation.

James Dean, CPImages

The cult of H’wood death sprung up generations ago.  Here are a few Immortals we created – Marilyn Monroe [who, like Ledger, was found naked at the time of her death], James Dean,  Anna Nicole Smith, Jayne Mansfield, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, John Belushi, Tupak Shakur,  Brandon Lee,  River Phoenix, Aaliyah, Heather O‘Rourke, Rudolph Valentino,  and the mother of them all, The Princess of Wales. Each died young, left a good-looking corpse and unfulfilled promise. Elvis Presley fails the age criteria but is an honorary Immortal.

Lesser, small ‘i’ immortals are known for the ways they died, not their achievements and include:

• George ‘Superman’ Reeves  who was tubby and  over the hill, a probable suicide
• Wallace Reid, the  Brad Pitt of the twenties, who was pushed to overwork, morphine addiction and death
• Peg Entwistle who was a talented Broadway actress who dove from the Hollywood sign, depressed that H’wood didn’t want her
• Rock Hudson  who was the first  H’wood ‘name’ to die of AIDS
• Sharon Tate, Adrienne Shelley, Rebecca Schaeffer, Dominique Dunne who were murdered
• Bob Crane , whose murder was a result of his weird sex life
• Troubled Brad Renfro, who died of a drug overdose, snuffing nascent talent for good

Dozens of websites are dedicated to dead celebs.  H’wood tourists can satisfy their morbid Joneses by taking the official Graveline Tour to celebrity death sites – Sal Mineo, Janis Joplin, Tate – and the star studded Westwood Memorial Park where Marilyn Monroe, Dunne and O’Rourke are parked.

I did the tour. You go in a hearse, the way the Immortals do.

Okay, time to settle in for tonight’s Ledger deathwatch.

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.