[JPL] Oscar Peterson's Least-Familiar Music

[Jazz Promo Services]

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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTDECEMBER 2, 2008, 10:33 P.M. ET
Oscar Peterson's Least-Familiar Music
By WILL FRIEDWALD

Once I was having a drink with the excellent singer and pianist Freddy Cole
when the stereo system served up a sound that made me stop dead in my
tracks: a recording I had never heard by the King Cole Trio, the legendary
combo led by Freddy's late older brother, Nat King Cole. I pointed this out
to Mr. Cole, and he shot me back a look that said "Gotcha!" It wasn't Nat
Cole at all; instead, it was an early recording in the King Cole style by
one of the King's most ardent subjects, the young Oscar Peterson.

Peterson (1925-2007) was quite possibly the most celebrated and prolifically
recorded jazz pianist of all time; even today, the size of the Peterson bin
in any record store will dwarf that of virtually any other artist. It's hard
to believe that any aspect of his prodigious catalog has been neglected by
reissue producers, yet Mosaic Records has just released a new seven-CD boxed
set, "The Complete Clef/Mercury Recordings of the Oscar Peterson Trio"
(available from www.mosaicrecords.com), containing his least-heard music,
from the very early period when the Canadian pianist's own North Star was
Nat Cole.

At the time of Cole's death in 1965, Peterson recorded a tribute album
("With Respect to Nat"), but it was always clear that the No. 1 influence on
his music was the great Art Tatum. It was Peterson who did more than any
other pianist to carry Tatum's torch into later generations. In a famous
quote, Peterson said that the first time he heard Art Tatum's playing (on a
record) he was so blown away that he couldn't bring himself to touch the
keyboard for several months. He later made up for it: Over the course of his
long career, virtually any night that Peterson performed, he played so much
piano that it would take any other player a whole month to equal the
quantity and quality of music Peterson produced in a single set.

In the pinnacle years of his fame, beginning with his high-energy trios of
1953-58 (with bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis), and then of
1959-65 (with Brown and drummer Ed Thigpen), up to his stroke in 1993,
Peterson was known as a daredevil virtuoso. He often sounded like 10 Art
Tatums playing at once, or like an acrobat who could walk a high wire at the
same time that he was being shot out of a cannon.

To hear Peterson playing with the combination of economy and virtuosity that
was the trademark of Nat King Cole is a startling thing, yet track after
track (including "Turtle Neck," the original Peterson swinger that opens the
set) finds Peterson, the man who would later be king, playing in the King's
court. To start with, the instrumentation, of Brown's bass and Barney
Kessel's guitar, was deliberately patterned after Cole's trend-setting
piano-guitar-bass trio (a trend that Tatum himself even followed for a while
in the '40s -- and so did many others, from Ray Charles to Red Norvo). And
for one date in 1952, the guitarist was Irving Ashby, who had served with
Cole for several years. And it's not just the format or the abstract mindset
-- the Oscar Peterson Trio closely follows the arrangement style, the
chordal voicings, the approach to melody and harmony, and the back-phrasing
employed on key parts of the tunes of the King Cole Trio. Peterson's version
of "Body and Soul" seems less like a remake than a sequel to the classic
King Cole Trio recording of 1944, with Peterson and Kessel obviously very
conscious of Cole and his guitarist Oscar Moore.

It wasn't a coincidence. Cole had earlier been the star of producer Norman
Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series, but around this time he
gave up his trio to become one of the most successful pop singers ever. John
McDonough, an occasional contributor to the Journal, quotes Granz in his
excellent liner notes as saying that he was looking for a replacement for
Cole. "And then, when I found Oscar, he became my Nat Cole." As if the sound
of the piano and the trio weren't close enough, Peterson even sings (on six
titles here) in a high voice that sounds like a Canadian King Cole.

The music itself is consistently brilliant. Peterson shows that he already
had his own voice on the keyboard on bassist Oscar Pettiford's "Pettiford's
Tune" (later known as "Swingin' Till the Girls Come Home") -- and especially
in a series of six extra-long numbers, which pretty much toss formal
arrangements aside in favor of raw, even competitive jamming, which fit the
pianist's own description that "having an opposing force [like Kessel]
shocked me. He came hungry to play, and the first night Barney nailed me to
the cross six ways till Sunday."

Though these after-hours-style recordings are exciting in the extreme, the
meat of the boxed set is a series of six early LPs instigated by Granz that
were among the earliest jazz songbook albums, devoted to the works of Cole
Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and
Vincent Youmans. These projects signify the beginning of Peterson's
reputation as not only a jazz pianist but one of the definitive instrumental
interpreters of the Great American Songbook. In years to come, his fingers,
not his throat, would continue to give voice to these composers' melodies.
As Peterson himself once related, the first time Nat Cole came to hear him,
he told the younger man, "Look, I'll make a deal with you: You don't sing,
and I won't play piano!"

Mr. Friedwald is the author of seven books on music and popular culture and
was the jazz critic for The New York Sun.

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