Working the Dead Beat (13 page)

On some points, though, he was very clear, such as why he chose concrete early on as a building material. “It was cheap and so it was very competitive in the market. And I think I just loved it because of its relationship to stone and to quarries.”

When asked about the Graham house in Vancouver, which had been demolished, and Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, which was modified to improve the acoustics, he grew philosophical about how he coped with the demands of clients and the way they might later use and abuse his vision. “You have to walk away,” he said, “but you never leave it entirely. It is like mud being thrown in your face and you just have to put up with it.”

The effort of being interviewed must have been exhausting for him, but he was so patient with himself and my questions that I was humbled by his grace, even as I was touched by his fragility. Once so opinionated and confident as a world traveller, teacher, and visionary architect, he now seemed as fragile as a wilting flower.

Although he loved living in his home and garden in Point Grey, he had reached the point where he needed more care and eventually moved into a nursing home. He died in Vancouver of complications from dementia on May 20, 2009, at age eighty-four.

 

Oscar Peterson

Jazz Pianist and Composer

August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007

A
GIANT OF
a man stretching to more than six feet in height and weighing in excess of two hundred pounds, Oscar Peterson could caress the keys with gentleness, make them swing with abandon, and boogie as though tomorrow were an abstract concept. His large hands gave him a reach that allowed him to roam across the keyboard like a hereditary ruler inspecting his domain. Duke Ellington called him the maharajah of the keyboard; Count Basie said he “plays the best ivory box I've ever heard.”

Art Tatum was Peterson's idol, but most jazz fans think Peterson was right up there with the legendary player. He was blessed with perfect pitch, but it was his determination, his obsessive practising, recording, and touring, and his infectious delight in playing that made him a star. He grew up in a lower-middle-class family in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood of Montreal, the same area where former governor general Michaëlle Jean and her family would settle after their arrival from Haiti in 1968. Prejudice was ubiquitous and opportunities were scarce and low-level, but Peterson, the son of an immigrant railway porter, was raised in a stable home where discipline was rampant and mastering a musical instrument was as rigorously enforced as church attendance.

Racism in Canada during Peterson's youth and early adulthood was not legalized or institutionalized, but it did exist as a nasty, unofficial blight directed sporadically at all those seen as alien to a primarily white-skinned Anglo-Saxon Canada; reviled groups included not just blacks but also Asians and First Nations. Skin colour wasn't the only trigger for prejudice — anti-Semitism was rife, francophones were derided as priest-ridden rubes, and immigrants in general were suspect. The law might rule that all were equal, but custom dictated otherwise.

Peterson's soaring talent enabled him to surmount racial barriers that were more flexible in Canada than in countries with entrenched slave cultures such as the United States. As a teenager he played in the all-white Johnny Holmes Orchestra, the best swing band in Montreal, and he landed a solo radio show. In a career lasting more than sixty years, Peterson made jazz swing on both sides of the border, developed a musical community based in Canada that stretched around the world, and broke down racial barriers long before there was a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He released more than two hundred recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, played thousands of live concerts, and composed pieces for piano, trio, quartet, and big band.

He even sang, in a voice that echoed the light baritone of Nat King Cole, who first became a big name in the late 1930s as the piano-playing leader of a jazz trio. After Peterson recorded an album of vocals in the mid-1950s in which he accompanied himself on the piano, Cole, who by then was a celebrated singer, jokingly said: “I'll make a deal with you, Oscar. You don't sing and I won't play the piano.” And that's what happened, until Cole died in 1965 and Peterson released
With Respect to Nat
, a dozen tunes that Peterson sang in tribute to his mentor and friend.

Among Peterson's notable recordings are
The Complete Young Oscar Peterson
;
Swinging Brass with the Oscar Peterson Trio
;
The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival
;
The Way I Really Play
;
Exclusively for My Friends
;
Oscar Peterson: London House Sessions
; and
Oscar Peterson: The Trio
. His best-known compositions are “Hymn to Freedom,” inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s, which appears on his album
Night Train
, a bestselling record from its release in 1962, and
Canadiana Suite
, a tribute to this country and to the memory of his father's work on the railway in the way it moves thematically across the country from east to west.

The intricacy and speed with which Peterson could stroke the keys was so daunting that some critics complained he was too much about technique and too little about interpretation. Peterson himself supplied the best rejoinder: “Technique is something you use to make your ideas listenable,” he said to jazz writer Len Lyons. “You learn to play the instrument so you have a musical vocabulary, and you practise to get your technique to the point you need to express yourself, depending on how heavy your ideas are.”

His signature style, which incorporated swing and bop, was set early on, which prompted conclusions that he wasn't innovative. True perhaps in the traditional sense of developing a new style of music, but Peterson's genius lay in another area: he set the standard for the modern jazz combo. He excelled at playing with others, as a sensitive accompanist to singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and trumpeter Roy Eldridge, in duos with pianist Count Basie and guitarist Joe Pass, and especially in the trios he formed with bassist Ray Brown, guitarist Herb Ellis, and, after Ellis joined Alcoholics Anonymous and gave up touring, drummer Ed Thigpen.

Instead of merely following Peterson's lead, all the musicians, Peterson included, played with, and off, each other. As Peterson himself once explained, “You have to listen to find how a tune expands or contracts, and each performance has its own pulsation. And a performance needs dynamics, where a tune grows or falls away. You can't perform a tune on one level.”

Pianist Herbie Hancock, a jazz star from a younger generation, said in a tribute to Peterson that he “redefined swing for modern jazz pianists for the latter half of the twentieth century” and “mastered the balance between technique, hard blues grooving and tenderness.” An even younger jazz pianist, Canadian Diana Krall, said he was her inspiration as a high school student.

Diligent and professional, Peterson didn't emote on stage or sate his angst with drink, drugs, or eccentricity when he was out of the spotlight. His celebrity was not of the headline-blaring kind, although he was honoured with many awards, including the Order of Canada and several honorary degrees, and had parks, schools, and streets named for him. But there was a toll from such a long career and the relentless touring and recording. He had three failed marriages before marrying his fourth wife, Kelly Green, by whom he had his seventh child, Céline.

He never retired and he never gave up; perhaps he continued to hear his father's demanding voice for the entirety of his life. A year after suffering a stroke in 1993 that paralyzed much of his left side, he was back performing before live audiences, causing his friend, politician and amateur pianist Bob Rae to declare: “a one-handed Oscar was better than just about anyone with two hands.”

OSCAR EMMANUEL PETERSON
was born in the Saint-Henri district of Montreal on August 15, 1925, the fourth of five children of Daniel Peterson, a Caribbean immigrant sailor. His father, who had always wanted to play the piano, bought himself a collapsible organ and a series of books on theory and practice, and he took them aboard in his luggage. He taught himself to play keyboard during his long voyages as a bosun's mate, and his son inherited that determination and work ethic. Oscar's mother, Kathleen Peterson (née John), who was also from the West Indies, was a domestic from a well-­educated family.

After their marriage, Daniel Peterson worked as a sleeping-car porter for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Culturally ambitious, he loved to read poetry and the classics aloud, taught his children to read and write long before they went to school, and insisted that his wife and all of his offspring learn to play a musical instrument. He set his children lessons and exercises and expected the older ones to tutor the younger ones while he was away on his transcontinental stints. On his return he would listen to them play, and if they didn't perform flawlessly he punished them harshly, often beating them with a belt.

By the time he was five, Oscar was learning both the trumpet and the piano. Two years later he contracted tuberculosis and, according to the treatment of the day, was confined to bed at the Montreal Children's Hospital. He was “cured” thirteen months later. His father, worried that his lung capacity had been compromised, made him give up the trumpet and concentrate on the piano, like his older brothers, Fred and Chuck, and his sister, Daisy.

Oscar told biographer Gene Lees in
Oscar Peterson: The Will to Swing
that Fred was the best pianist in the family. Fred died of tuberculosis when he was fifteen, leaving his nine-year-old brother without a role model. Oscar's father may have been the family taskmaster, but his older sister, Daisy, was the natural teacher. Her tutelage and her brother's natural ability combined to impress pianist Lou Hooper, who'd played jazz in Harlem in the 1920s. He took on the eleven-year-old as a private student in 1936.

When Hooper joined the armed forces after the outbreak of the Second World War, Daisy found her brother another teacher, the Hungarian emigré Paul de Marky, a pianist and composer who had studied in Budapest with István Thomán, a pupil of Franz Liszt. “I taught him technique, speedy fingers, because that's what you need in modern jazz,” de Marky told Lees in a 1982 interview. “I gave Oscar Chopin studies. And then mostly, as I found that he was so good at melodic ballad style, I gave him the idea of big chords, like Debussy has them.”

For his part, Oscar told Lees that de Marky instilled “musical and artistic” confidence. “It's one thing to know you can play, to know you can skate up and down the rink, but as to how well you look doing it, how much finesse you have, how much confidence, how much interest you can create in your audience, I guess that all has to do with it. He made me believe that I did have something to offer the music world.”

Through Hooper and de Marky, young Peterson's fingers were linked to the virtuosity of twentieth-century American jazz and nineteenth-century European expressionism. But there was another influence, from a pianist closer in age to Peterson, a virtuoso who made Peterson question his own talent and ability. The player was Art Tatum, a nearly blind, largely self-taught musician about fifteen years older than Peterson. Influenced by Fats Waller, he could play extremely fast and was a virtuoso of stride — the technique whereby the pianist plays chords with the left hand and the melody with the right. Fats Waller is alleged to have walked away from the piano bench when Tatum strolled into the club where Waller was playing, saying, “I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house.”

Daniel Peterson brought home a recording of Tatum playing “Tiger Rag” and played it for his son because he thought the boy was becoming too enamoured of his own prowess. Oscar was so overwhelmed that “I gave up the piano for two solid months; and I had crying fits at night,” he later told his friend the pianist and conductor André Previn.

For the rest of his life Peterson described himself as an “Art Tatum-ite,” saying, “he was and is my musical God, and I feel honoured to remain one of his humbly devoted disciples.” Strangely, both his idol Tatum and his father, Daniel Peterson, died within a week of each other in 1956. A devastated Peterson said later that he had “lost two of the best friends I ever had.”

Once he regained his confidence, Peterson was obsessive about practising and playing boogie-woogie on the school piano during recess and lunch breaks. Along with trumpeter Maynard Ferguson he played in a band called the Montreal High School Victory Serenaders. His sister, Daisy, pushed him into auditioning for a national amateur contest sponsored by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He won the semifinals and the grand prize of $250 in a competition in Toronto, using the money to buy himself a piano. The contest led to a gig on
Fifteen Minutes' Piano Rambling
, a weekly radio show on Montreal station
CKAC
, as well as other spots that included
The Happy Gang
on
CBC
. He was such a musical success that he dropped out of high school at seventeen to play full-time, a decision his father reluctantly accepted with the proviso that Peterson become not just another piano player but the best. And that is what he set out to do.

He played with the Johnny Holmes Orchestra from 1942 through 1947 as the “Brown Bomber of Boogie-Woogie,” a reference that likened his two-handed playing to boxer Joe Louis's knockout punching style. Until joining Johnny Holmes, Peterson had played as a solo performer, free to suit only himself in style and repertoire; now he had to learn to play in concert with the rest of the orchestra, a discipline that helped him as a ballad player.

He was the only black member of the orchestra, which exposed him to blatant racism when they played at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal and at resorts in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. He mostly withstood the prejudice with dignity, but every so often his rage would surface and he would lash out physically at the injustice of being called a nigger or denied what other, lighter-skinned folks took as their due.

By his early twenties, Peterson had already made several recordings for
RCA
Victor and was leading a trio at the Alberta Lounge in Montreal, sessions that radio station
CJAD
broadcasted live to its listeners for fifteen minutes on Wednesday nights. That's how Norman Granz discovered Peterson — at least, according to a story that the American jazz impresario, concert promoter, and record producer loved to tell.

In the late 1940s, at the end of a visit to Montreal, Granz was in a cab heading to the airport when he chanced to hear a jazz trio with an electrifying pianist on the car radio. He asked the cabbie for the name of the station so he could find out the title of the disc. That's not a recording, the cab driver explained; that's live from the Alberta Lounge. Forget the airport, Granz ordered, take me there. That impromptu decision led Granz to become Peterson's manager, signing the young pianist to his Verve label.