“Oscar’s playing was magnificent and always wonderfully swinging,” said Marian McPartland after hearing of Peterson’s death.
At several points in his career, he added singing to his arsenal of skills, producing a few recordings in which both his piano and his voice are remarkably reminiscent of Nat “King” Cole. That, in Peterson’s case, meant a mastery reaching from stride piano through the swing era and into bebop. He had already encompassed what a jazz pianist should be.” “And Oscar had everything going for him when he was still very young, maybe before he was 20. “We came up about the same time,” Brubeck told The Times some years ago. Peterson performed with some of jazz’s most iconic figures, from Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong to Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald - revealing the capacity to adjust to a diverse array of styles without losing contact with his own essential musical qualities. Exhibiting a technique that dazzled even the classical pianists who heard him play, Tatum created hard-swinging, instantaneous compositions with content and structure that rivaled the complexities of a Chopin etude. Now it’s almost impossible for me to think of him in the past tense.”Īt a time when the piano players of the fertile post-World War II jazz era were establishing their own beachheads on the scene - Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, George Shearing, Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, among many others - Peterson’s command of the instrument gave him a unique status, one that hadn’t been seen since the prewar virtuosity of the legendary Art Tatum. We were together at his house in October, playing and singing songs together. I didn’t know then we’d become such close friends over the years. “In my high school yearbook it says that my goal is to become a jazz pianist like Oscar Peterson. “He was the reason I became a jazz pianist,” she told The Times. Singer and pianist Diana Krall, like Peterson a Canadian, was similarly affected, generations later, by Peterson. The groove and the blues, but with the sophistication that I was used to from classical music.” But it was primarily the groove that moved me about Oscar. “I had started off as a classical pianist, and I was dazzled by the precision of his playing. “I consider him to be the dominant piano player that established my foundation,” pianist Herbie Hancock said Monday. His home country - where he continued to live for most of his life - made him a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and he was the first living Canadian to be depicted on a postage stamp. Among the most significant were eight Grammys, as well as a Recording Academy lifetime achievement honor in 1997.
In failing health in recent months, Peterson died from kidney failure at his home in Mississauga, Canada, near Toronto, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Co.įrom the time he came on the scene in the United States, beginning his six-decade career with a Carnegie Hall concert in 1949, Peterson was universally admired. Oscar Peterson, whose technical virtuosity, imaginative improvising and ineffable sense of swing made him one of the jazz world’s most influential and honored pianists, died Sunday.
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