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. He was 82.
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.
From 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. His awards are almost countless. Among the most significant were eight Grammys, as well as a Recording Academy lifetime achievement honor in 1997. 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.
"I consider him to be the dominant piano player that established my foundation," pianist Herbie Hancock said Monday. "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 affected, generations later, by Peterson.
"He was the reason I became a jazz pianist," she 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 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. 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.
