Jazz Legend
Oscar Peterson
Oscar Peterson
Oscar Peterson was born on August 15, 1925 to Daniel and Kathleen Peterson, in a poor neighborhood near Montreal, Canada. Daniel Peterson was a self-taught musician who imposed his love of music to his children ((Fred, Daisy, Charles, Oscar and May))as a means to rise above their current financial status. Oscar began playing the trumpet at the young age of 7, but due to a bout with tuberculosis for which he was hospitalized for 13 months, he put down the trumpet for the piano. His older sister, Daisy, started teaching him to play classical piano.
Oscar soon started taking lessons from accomplished classical pianist, Hungarian Paul de Marky, and this is where he learned "technique and speedy fingers". Oscar would often practice four to six hours a day. He was soon able to reap the benefits of his labor at the age of 14 when he won the national music competition organized by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Oscar soon dropped out of high school to pursue his dreams of being the best piano player. He had a weekly radio gig on Montreal radio, “Fifteen Minutes’ Piano Rambling” and then a national broadcast, “The Happy Gang.” It was during one of his live radio broadcast that Norman Granz discovered Oscar and immediately went to the club to meet him. Granz would soon become Oscar’s manager and in 1949 introduced Oscar at Carnegie Hall during a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert.
Over the next 40 plus years, Oscar Peterson
went on to win
eight Grammy awards, the Roy Thomson Award, a Toronto Arts Award for lifetime
achievement, the Governor General's Performing Arts Award, the Glenn Gould Prize, the award
of the International Society for Performing Artists, the Loyola Medal of Concordia University,
the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Praemium Imperiale World Art Award, the UNESCO Music
Prize, and the Toronto Musicians' Association Musician of the Year award. Also during this
time he’s performed with many jazz greats; Ray Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Milt
Jackson, Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, Ed Thigpen, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Louis Armstrong,
Stéphane Grappelli, Ella Fitzgerald, Clark Terry, Joe Pass, Anita O'Day, Fred Astaire, Count
Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Stan Getz.
Oscar Peterson, one of the world's best known jazz pianists, died at age 82.