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.
The tale is a tall one, according to biographer Lees, who speculates that Granz was in Montreal specifically to catch Peterson’s trio at the Alberta lounge. Peterson was known to several o
f Granz’s other recording artists, and the Lounge, located around the corner from Windsor Station, was a popular destination for train-riding jazz lovers from both sides of the border, including Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Coleman Hawkins. Whether the story is true hardly matters. It is a good yarn, Peterson and Granz stood by it, and the meeting was propitious for both men and for jazz.
Granz persuaded Peterson to expand beyond bop and embrace boogie-woogie and to appear as a “surprise” guest at one of his “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City in September 1949. Peterson couldn’t get a work visa to play professionally, so Granz planted him in a seat among the audience, pretended to spot his protegé, and invited him onstage to play as a favour to the crowd. Peterson played “Fine and Dandy” and “Tenderly,” among other pieces. The crowd went wild, giving him his first big break in the U.S. market less than a month after his twenty-fourth birthday. Reporter Mike Levin wrote in DownBeat that Peterson had “stopped” the concert “dead cold in its tracks” with “a flashy right hand, a load of bop,” and a good “sense of harmonic development” and had “scared some of the local modern minions by playing bop ideas in his left hand, which is distinctly not the common practice.” That performance was immortalized on Jazz at the Philharmonic.
Early the following year, Peterson won the DownBeat readers’ poll for the first of numerous times. Granz was Peterson’s manager for most of Peterson’s career, in a relationship that was as inspirational as it was rewarding. Granz, whose heritage was Jewish and Ukrainian, knew about prejudice and wasn’t prepared to tolerate racism, especially when it affected his passion, which was jazz. He took freewheeling jam sessions out of after-hours clubs and put them on tour and into concert halls all over the U.S., refusing to accept bookings in segregated halls.
Granz’s “Jazz at the Philharmonic” (JATP) tours and recordings of live concerts eventually travelled to Canada, Europe, and Japan. He made stars of many of his players, none more so than Peterson, finding them audiences far beyond their jazz base. He owned several record labels over the years: Clef, Norgran, Verve, and Pablo. As Peterson’s manager, mentor, and friend, Granz was the one who suggested he should form his first major trio, with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis.
Peterson’s career was soaring, but the incessant touring and performing played havoc with his home life. He had married Lillie Fraser, the daughter of a Montreal-based railway porter, in September 1944, when he was barely nineteen. The marriage couldn’t survive the loneliness they both endured: she in a small apartment coping with five small children, he on the road for weeks at a time. He moved his family to Toronto in 1958 and tried to stay put by founding the Advanced School of Contemporary Music. He liked teaching, but touring and performing live were his adrenalin. Both the marriage and the school gave way to his international playing and recording schedule. In later years he was a mentor in the jazz program at York University and was chancellor of the university from 1991 to 1994.
Peterson played at the top of his form until his late sixties, but then ill-health began to catch up with him. He’d had arthritis in his hands since childhood, but it became more pronounced in his seventies. His expanding girth — his weight crept up to 280 pounds — affected his mobility so much that the journey from backstage to the piano often became painful to observe. He had hip-replacement surgery in the early 1980s.
Peterson was playing at the Blue Note in New York in May 1993 when he felt a strange sensation in his left side and realized his left hand wasn’t responding to the music. He had suffered a stroke, which severely weakened his left side and robbed him of his two-fisted technique. At first he was depressed, but he was determined to overcome his disability. Within two years he was performing and recording “Side by Side” with violinist Itzhak Perlman and touring again, although at a much less frantic pace.
In 2003 he recorded A Night in Vienna with Niels-Henning Pedersen, Ulf Wakenius, and Martin Drew. He continued to tour, with rests between concerts to restore his strength. Among his accompanists were Wakenius on guitar, David Young on bass, and Alvin Queen on drums. There was a celebration with about two hundred friends for his eightieth birthday in 2005. Diana Krall sang “Happy Birthday” and performed a vocal version of his song “When Summer Comes,” with lyrics written by her husband, Elvis Costello. That same year Canada Post issued a stamp in his honour, the first time a living person other than royalty had been commemorated in that way.
By 2007 kidney disease forced him to cancel a performance at the Toronto Jazz Festival and an appearance at a Carnegie Hall all-star concert in his honour. A little more than two weeks after he died of kidney failure — at home in Mississauga, Ontario, on December 23, 2007 — musical greats including Herbie Hancock, Nancy Wilson, and Quincy Jones assembled in a memorial concert at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. More than 2,500 people attended the free concert, many of them having lined up for hours to pay tribute to Canada’s foremost jazz musician.
Maureen Forrester
Contralto
July 25, 1930 – June 16, 2010
NOBODY WILL EVER know where Maureen Forrester’s voice came from, what combination of genetics and serendipity produced the marvellous velvet sound that will live on as long as recordings and digital archives last. What’s important is what Forrester did with her gift, working as a clerk to pay for singing lessons, training with the best coaches she could find, travelling the world to perform — at her peak, she gave 120 concerts a year. No matter how crowded the auditorium, she poured the immensity of her emotions into her music, as though she was singing directly into the ear of each member of the audience.
A contralto who made Mahler her own, she “had a singular beauty of sound, intensity of musical focus and a haunting darkness of feeling,” according to conductor Sir Andrew Davis. “She could fill the softest pianissimo with an eerie carrying power” and she “could weave a spell better than anyone,” he told the Globe and Mail after her death in 2010.
Forrester, who dropped out of school at thirteen, could quickly master the most difficult music and sing fluently in several languages an expansive and versatile repertoire that included everything from lieder to oratorios to opera to torch ballads. She even belted out “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” at Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s “shamrock summit” with U.S. president Ronald Reagan in Quebec City in 1985.
A buxom, flamboyant woman with a magnetic presence on or off the stage, Forrester looked like a Valkyrie but performed like a professional. She was the opposite of a haughty and imperious prima donna. She appeared under the baton of international maestros that included Bruno Walter, Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Davis, Mario Bernardi, and Seiji Ozawa and sang with nearly every major orchestra in the West and the East, in the northern and southern hemispheres, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Primarily known for her mastery of German lieder and her interpretation of Mahler, Forrester was also a celebrated opera singer, although roles for contraltos invariably take second place to soprano parts. She made her Canadian debut as Orpheus in Orpheus and Eurydice at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto in 1962. Other significant roles were Cornelia in Julius Caesar for the New York Opera in 1966, Erda in Das Rheingold at the Metropolitan Opera in 1975, and the Countess in The Queen of Spades at La Scala in 1990. She embraced the role of the witch in Norman Campbell’s CBC production of Hansel and Gretel (a role she reprised at the Guelph Spring Festival in 1979) with such gusto that friends of her children regularly asked her if she could fly around the living room on her broom.
Internationally recognized and honoured at home with a succession of prizes and awards, including Companion of the Order of Canada, she always gave back, promoting the works of Canadian composers such as Harry Somers, R. Murray Schafer, Murray Adaskin, and Alexander Brott. When she was at the peak of her international acclaim, she served an arduous five-year term as chair of the Canada Council for the A
rts from 1983 to 1988, putting her name and her energy on the line to boost the careers of other artists, to protect the arm’s-length principle from government interference and lobbying hard for more public money and support for the arts. She also served as chancellor of Wilfrid Laurier University from 1986 to 1990, as well as donating time, money, and effort to myriad artistic causes.
No singer was too insignificant for her to encourage and coach; no audience was too small or too remotely located to command her presence. In 1994, when she had been a galactic star for nearly three decades, she accepted an invitation to sing in an operetta in Chicoutimi, Quebec. “They think, ‘She’ll never come,’” she said at the time. “But of course I’ll come. These crowds are wonderful. They wait all year for you.”
As frank about her facelifts as she was about her affairs, she jokingly bemoaned that she was invariably cast in the roles of “mothers, maids, witches, bitches, mediums, nuns, aunts and pants” but rarely as the bride. A lifetime of frenetic busyness, as she juggled home and career, became endemic for a woman who was intelligent but not an intellectual, who could focus intensely to learn a new piece of music but wasn’t really interested in reading for pleasure or stimulation.
There was more to her frantic schedule than a love of audience and applause. She never forgot her church choir roots, remaining grateful for the opportunities she had been given as a teenager to sing in chapels and halls. Besides all that, she was the financial support for a brood of six children. In her prime she could command towering fees, but the expenses for her gowns, accompanists, travel, and housekeepers were huge. She had to keep working.
Although she loved luxury — her former husband, violinist Eugene Kash, once said she “lived on the gross and never considered the net” — she also relished scrubbing her own kitchen floor. For Canadians she was that rarest of creatures in the 1970s and ’80s — a working mother with an international career who insisted on making her home in Canada.
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