Oscar Peterson, jazz piano giant, dies at 82
The influential Canadian-born musician is remembered for his versatility and his fast-fingered virtuosity. But there was also, in the words of Herbie Hanock, 'the groove and the blues.'
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.
