One of the word’s most famous and talented jazz pianists, Oscar Peterson, has died at the age of 82. He died due to kidney failure on December 23rd. In his career he recorded more than 200 albums and worked with the biggest names in jazz, from Dizzy Gillespie to Count Basie.
Peterson was born on August 15, 1925, the fourth of five children of a Canadian Pacific Railway porter who played piano. The family lived in Little Burgundy, a black enclave in Montreal, where Peterson’s elder sister, Daisy, gave her siblings their first piano lessons.
Musicians Teddy Wilson and Nat “King” Cole were among early influences. When Peterson was a teenager his father played him a recording of Art Tatum — the lightning-fast pianist to whom Peterson would later be compared — which intimidated him so much he stayed away from the piano for a month.
At 14, he began performing for radio and played in a school band that included trumpeter Maynard Ferguson.
His career on the rise, Peterson asked his father if he could drop out of school. The elder Peterson said he would not “let him leave high school to be a jazz piano player. You have to be the best, there is no second best.”
In 1953, Peterson formed the Oscar Peterson Trio, joining up with bassist Ray Brown, and then guitarist Herb Ellis. They became one of the hardest-working trios in jazz, touring the U.S. under Ganz’s management.
In the video an unusual trio, Oscar Peterson on piano, Ray Brown & Niels Pedersen both on double bass, perform “You Look Good To Me” at the Montreux Jazz Festival, 1977.
