Love Walked In

Oscar Peterson was known as the Maharaja of the Keyboard by Duke Ellington and many other people. He was a Canadian jazz piano legend. For the longest time, I have longed to play the piano like he does. However, I never had the confidence to pursue jazz on the piano until recently. The pandemic has given me a lot of time to learn new skills. I’m realizing that anything is possible with a good teacher and a lot of practise.

So I am taking jazz piano lessons now, but I will never forget Oscar Peterson, the man who made me realize how much one can do with the piano. I’ve spent many hours of my life listening to his albums.

Born in 1925 in Montreal, Oscar started his career at age fourteen in the Johnny Holmes Orchestra. He started playing for the American audience in 1949 at Carnegie Hall in New York. Later, he started the Oscar Peterson Trio in the 1950s. Also, in the 1950s, he collaborated with Louis Armstrong (You Go To My Head) and Ella Fitzgerald (Moonlight in Vermont). During his teenage years, Oscar became arthritic but obviously that never stopped him.

American civil rights’ leader Dr Martin Luther King Junior always said that ‘Hymn to Freedom’ by Oscar Peterson was his jam. ‘Honey-Dripper’ is dazzlingly complex, and even dizzying. Obviously, I enjoy his song ‘Love Walked In’. The Night Train album was his most successful, but the Canadiana Suite was also really highly regarded.

I would wager that every jazz pianist knows Oscar Peterson’s name. Many among them are inspired by him. British Columbia’s Diana Krall is included on both counts. Diana Krall is known for her deep, sultry voice in the jazz genre. Oscar has done masterclasses on piano which are now available to view on YouTube.

This leads me to my next point: Oscar Peterson was as much an educator as he was a performer. He mostly taught Toronto students. Oscar started the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto. He also mentored the jazz program at York University, which is also in Toronto. He got students to play three Johann Sebastian Bach songs, especially: The Art of Fugue, The Well-Tempered Clavier, and the Goldberg Variations. He felt that these songs were essential for any serious pianist. There is also a scholarship called the Oscar Peterson Scholarship, meant for any jazz student to receive funding in order to learn to play jazz music.

Oscar Peterson has won a lot of awards. It would be really difficult to name them all. However, in 1950, he won Downbeat’s pianist of the year. He received the Order of Canada. He got inducted to the Canadian Music Hall of fame in 1978. He won the Martin Luther King Jr Achievement Award. These are his earliest awards and honours, and he has received many more since then. Most recently, in 2021, he earned the Historica Canada Heritage Minute posthumously.

Oscar Peterson was a big man. He smoked, and every time he quit, he would gain more weight. He had a stroke and needed a hip replacement surgery at the beginning of the 1990s. He had to take some time off from the piano to regain his strength, since having the stroke. He ended up playing one-handed for a while, still a lot better than many pianists with both hands.

His health got so bad that he could not attend the Toronto Jazz Festival in 2007. There was also a Carnegie Hall show playing in his honour that he could not attend, sadly enough. He later passed on December 23, 2007.