A brilliant improviser and outstanding musician, the Canadian pianist died Sunday at the age of 82.
Let’s say that Oscar Peterson was born in Montreal on August 15, 1925, died in Toronto just before Christmas, and that he was an encyclopedic virtuoso pianist. In him was summed up a large part of the history of jazz since, having begun his career in the 40s, he combined swing and be-bop influences, the prowess of Art Tatum, his idol, Bud Powell, and the great pyrotechnicians of the time. stride. In his approach to the keyboard too: a touch that was at once soft, elastic, striking, cool. In his ability to accompany jazz geniuses of all categories, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday. In the class he displayed to set the biggest concert halls ablaze with a simple trio (but what a trio!), a repertoire of incredible variety, breathtaking velocity and a sound that would glue you to your seat after three bars. Encyclopedic in the hundreds of albums recorded, the tens of thousands of concerts.
Tours. His biography is very classic. Raised in a family of amateur musicians from the Virgin Islands, an archipelago in the Caribbean, and settled in Canada, he was a young prodigy who won his first competition at 14 and began a career in radio. His career then went smoothly to the top. His father would have wanted him to be a classical pianist. But when we know that he participated for decades in the tours of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, we can’t help but think that he was a classical musician in his own way. In this context, he gave a concert at Carnegie Hall at 24 which immediately earned him a place among the greatest.
Respect.«Oscar,declared the great composer Lalo Schifrin in 1975, represents a lost tradition in America – the improvising piano virtuoso like Chopin, the tradition of bravura playing that began with Beethoven and reached its apotheosis with Franz Liszt. After that, pianists began to play the written compositions. Oscar is a true romantic in the 19th century sense, with the addition of the 20th century African-American jazz tradition.”
His generosity and musical intelligence made him an outstanding musician, but the man, a gentle giant with firm convictions, commanded respect. Confronted with illness (tuberculosis, arthritis, etc.) at a very young age, he managed to play in the worst health conditions. In 1993, the victim of a stroke, he first finished playing before collapsing. He often put this courage to the service of the fight against racism, since his support for the Martin Luther King march in 1963. His generosity, for its part, led him to create a music school in 1960 in Toronto, the Advanced School of Contemporary Music, and to teach at the highest level. between his countless concerts. The Oscar for best comrade, in addition? Selected, in any case.
