Oscar Peterson, jazz piano giant, dies at 82

Oscar Peterson, whose technical virtuosity, imaginative improvising and ineffable sense of swing made him one of the jazz world’s most influential pianists, died Sunday. He was 82.

In failing health in recent months, Peterson died of kidney failure at this home in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

From the time he came on the scene in the United States, beginning his career with a concert at Carnegie Hall concert in the late 1940s, Peterson has been universally admired.

“I consider him to be the dominant piano player that established my foundation,” pianist Herbie Hancock told The Times today. “I had started off as a classical pianist, and I was dazzled by the precision of his playing. But it was primarily the groove that moved me about Oscar. The groove and the blues, but with the sophistication that I was used to from classical music.”

Singer and pianist Diana Krall, like Peterson a Canadian, was similarly impacted, generations later.

“He was the reason I became a jazz pianist,” Krall told the Times.. “In my high school yearbook it says that my goal is to become a jazz pianist like Oscar Peterson. I didn’t know then we’d become such close friends over the years. We were together at his house in October, playing and singing songs together. Now it’s almost impossible for me to think of him in the past tense.”

At a time when the players of the fertile post-World War II jazz era were establishing their own beachheads on the jazz scene – Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, George Shearing, Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, among many others – Peterson’s mastery of the instrument gave him a unique status, one that hadn’t been seen since the pre-war virtuosity of Art Tatum. Performing with some of jazz’s most iconic figures – from Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong to Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald – he revealed an astonishing virtuosity, the capacity to adjust to a diverse array of styles without losing contact with his own essential musical qualities.

“We came up about the same time,” Brubeck told The Times a few years ago. “And Oscar had everything going for him when he was still very young, maybe before he was 20. He had already encompassed what a jazz pianist should be.”

That, in Peterson’s case, meant a mastery of reaching from stride piano, through the swing era and into bebop. 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.

“Oscar’s playing was magnificent and always wonderfully swinging,” said pianist Marian McPartland after hearing of Peterson’s death. “He was the finest technician that I have seen.”

But both his versatility and his fast-fingered virtuosity provoked criticism from some observers who found it difficult to look past Peterson’s technical brilliance into the heart of his improvisational inventiveness. Peterson, though, always shrugged off the comments.

Bassist Ray Brown, one of the key members of Peterson’s classic 1950s trio that also included guitarist Herb Ellis, felt that the criticism missed the point about what he believed was the real significance of Peterson’s playing.

“I don’t think very many people actually contribute to the music itself,” he told The Times in 1998. “That’s left to a very few, like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. When they came up with that stuff they did, they brought a change in music. More often, I think that contributions are made to the instrument. Take Lester Young, for example. He brought something new to the saxophone, something different from Coleman Hawkins. The music was there; he just did it a different way. What I would say is that Oscar has made an enormous contribution to the piano. It hasn’t been the same since he came on the scene.”

Brubeck, agreeing, put it all precisely in context. “You do what you have to do with whatever means you have at hand,” he said, adding, more pointedly, “But if you’ve got all that technique, it would be terrible not to use it.”

Peterson was quick to acknowledge that he stood on the shoulders of giants. Hancock recalled a dinner at Quincy Jones’ home a few years ago, at which he gathered the courage to ask a question of Peterson that had long troubled him.

“I’d always been afraid to ask,” said Hancock. “But, knowing my own feelings about Art Tatum, I was curious about how Oscar felt about him. So I asked, and he said, ‘Lemme tell you sir….’

“And he went on to tell me how, when he was a kid, he was a pretty good piano player, and he’d always hold his own in the cutting contests that young players had. And he said he got really cocky about it. So one day his father, who would take him to places to hear other piano players, said there was a guy coming in town that he might want to listen to. And Oscar said he thought, ‘Well, who could this be? I can beat the best of them.’ It was Art Tatum, of course. And he said that after he heard Tatum play, he went home, went up to the second floor of his house and immediately tried to push his piano out the window. He said he was never cocky again. And I said, ‘You, too, Oscar?’ And he said, ‘Me, too. Tatum scared me to death.’”

Along the way, Peterson scared plenty of other players. And despite his justified reverence for Tatum, he fashioned a career that easily stood on its own, in weight of accomplishment as well as creative longevity.

That creative longevity seemed destined to hit a roadblock in 1993, when Peterson, then 68, suffered a stroke, first experiencing its impact while he was performing at New York’s Blue Note Club.

“It was strange,” Peterson later told The Times. “I don’t remember any pain or any particular discomfort other than the way the fingers on my left hand reacted.”

Afterward, Peterson was told that the stroke had been caused by high blood pressure rather than arterial blockage.

“I wasn’t hospitalized for it,” he said, “but I was sent back to the clubhouse – which means home – not allowed to pitch the rest of the game.”

It turned out, however, to be more than a short period on the bench. Many hours of therapy were required in an effort to regain control and flexibility, as well as to cope with the psychological trauma of having to deal with his instrument in a completely new fashion.

But complete facility never returned to Peterson’s left hand.

“I still can’t do some of the things I used to be able to do with my left hand,” he said before an appearance at the Hollywood Bowl in 2001. “But I’ve learned to do more things with my right hand. And I’ve also moved in a direction that has always been important to me, toward concentrating on sound, toward making sure that each note counts.”

What was remarkable about the performance was the musical effectiveness of Peterson’s reformulation of the way he approached the piano. Although his left hand was primarily used for accents and single notes, his right hand work, sometimes playing simultaneous melodies and counter-lines, more than filled the gap. As pianist and Peterson acolyte Benny Green once noted, “Oscar can do more with one hand than many pianists can do with two.”

Born Aug. 15, 1925, in Montreal, Peterson began to study piano at the age of 5 – first with his father, Daniel Peterson, a West Indian immigrant, then with his older sister, Daisy. Despite suffering lung-damaging tuberculosis at age 6, he continued to study both piano and trumpet, urged on by his father, who insisted that all his five children have musical educations.