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Oscar Peterson smiles as he is presented with the Internation Association of Jazz Education president's award
during a gala dinner in Toronto on Jan. 8, 2003. (CP Photo/Frank Gunn)
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INDEPTH: OSCAR PETERSON
Oscar Peterson: the road to success
CBC News Online | June 2004
Oscar Peterson in 1958 (CP Photo/CBC)
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In a career spanning seven decades, Oscar Peterson has been widely acknowledged as the finest composer and musician that Canada has ever produced. His accomplishments are even more impressive for someone born in an era when black North Americans were largely treated as second-class citizens.
His recording and performing partners include Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Louie Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Nat King Cole and Stan Getz. To this day, he is recognized internationally as one of jazz's greatest musicians.
The road began in Montreal, where Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was born on Aug. 15, 1925 to Daniel and Kathleen Peterson, an immigrant couple from the West Indies. He was the fourth of five children. All of the Peterson children were encouraged to study music by Daniel, a self-taught musician who worked as a porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Oscar began to study piano and trumpet when he was five. His ability to play the trumpet came to an abrupt halt a year later when he contracted tuberculosis, a disease that took the life of his brother Fred. Oscar recovered, but with his lungs permanently weakened, during a 13-month stay in Montreal's Children's Memorial Hospital.
With the trumpet no longer an option, Oscar turned his attention exclusively to piano, studying with his sister Daisy, who went on to her own a career as a pianist and instructor.
At 11, he was taught by Louis Hooper, a Canadian jazz musician who had worked in Harlem in the 1920s.
When he was 15, he began to study piano with Paul de Marky, a Hungarian émigré whose own training had been with a student of Franz Liszt.
"I taught him technique, speedy fingers, because that's what you need in modern jazz," de Marky recalled. " I gave Oscar Chopin studies. And then mostly, as I found that he was so good at melodic ballad style, I gave him the idea of big chords, like Debussy has them."
Oscar Peterson addresses the crowd during a tribute to Prime Minister Jean Chretien at the Liberal Convention in Toronto, Nov. 13,
2003. (CP Photo)
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Oscar's commitment to piano was such that he often practiced 12 hours a day, despite being afflicted in his teens with a painful form of arthritis.
When Oscar was 14, he won an amateur piano contest sponsored by the CBC. That led to a weekly show called Fifteen Minutes' Piano Rambling on a Montreal radio station, and to work on the CBC radio show The Happy Gang.
From 1943 to 1947, he was the featured soloist (and first black member) with the Johnny Holmes Orchestra, a Montreal dance band. During this time, he made his first recordings.
American promoter Norman Granz heard Peterson play in 1949, and was so impressed that he arranged for the young Canadian to perform later that year in a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall. Peterson was a hit, and his career in the United States had been launched.
He spent the early part of the 1950s touring with Jazz at the Philharmonic, then worked in a series of trios throughout the 1950s and 60s. His 1953-59 collaboration with bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis is considered the best of those groups.
In 1960 he also became an educator. With three other musicians (including Ray Brown), Peterson opened the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto. Peterson stayed with the school for five years, but eventually had to withdraw because of the demands of his performing career.
In 1964 he produced his best-known work, Canadiana Suite, which he called "my musical portrait of the Canada I love." A different region inspired each of the album's tracks. It was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1965.
Peterson decided to go it alone in the 1970s, making his solo debut at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1972. That same year, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
There continued to be outlets for Peterson's interest in music education. In 1974, he went to Alberta for the start of the Jazz Workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 1974. In the 1980s he became an adjunct professor of music at York University in Toronto, and in 1991 he became the university's chancellor.
In the early 1990s, Peterson got back together with Brown and Ellis for a reunion tour, which resulted in the album Live at the Blue Note. Peterson suffered a stroke in 1993 while performing at the Blue Note in New York; he finished the concert, but it was two years before he returned to performing.
Throughout the years, the honours have continued to roll in. Among the dozens of honours bestowed on him, Peterson was elevated to Companion of the Order of Canada in 1984, and received a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement in 1997. And despite his success in the United States and abroad, Peterson has always lived in Canada.
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