I met Oscar Peterson once. I was a teenager asking for his autograph after one of his concerts. He was a very big man and even sitting down he dominated the dressing room. I remember he had exceptionally long fingers and signing his name with flourish, he graciously thanked me for coming 'to our concert'. He said he hoped to see me next time. I left the theatre walking on air. At the time, the best seats in the house cost £1 and Peterson was pretty close to the peak of his abilities. Even in the gods (cost: 45p), an Oscar Peterson concert could be an overwhelming experience. It was easy to believe he was the world's greatest jazz pianist because he took virtuosity to absurd levels of accomplishment.
If you take a materialistic view of art, that the value of a jazz solo is increased proportionately by the number of notes it contains, then Peterson was undoubtedly the greatest. He was either exciting or very exciting with few intervening marks on the scale in-between. Even on a ballad he would double and treble the tempo to ratchet up the excitement.
By the time he had taken each number up through the gears and hit his cruising speed of around 120 mph, notes were passing by at a dizzying rate, prompting one critic to write, 'I keep going back to Oscar Peterson for the same naive reason I keep getting his records - a childlike hope that he loses the key to his automatic piano and plays it by hand again.'
Even so, audiences around the world flocked to see him. I remember in those days if somebody said they liked jazz and cited Oscar Peterson you knew there was a good chance they didn't know much about the music. Everybody loved him. The redeeming feature of his playing was the joy and humanity he communicated. His concerts were truly a celebration of his virtuosity.
When he suffered a stroke in 1994, causing him to lose much of the mobility of his left hand, he seemed to me like a winged bird but he played on until months before his death on 23 December 2007.
But when I first saw him at the Colston Hall in Bristol in 1970 (see poster left), blowing up a storm at the piano with bass and drums accompaniment, is how I'll remember him.
