Oscar Peterson
Keyboard Magazine, December 1980
My history with Oscar Peterson was a little rocky, let’s say. I’ll go into that story eventually here, but even after what I thought was a cordial acquaintanceship blew up unexpectedly a few years after this interview, I retained – and still do – profound respect for his musicianship, his epic command on the keys and his unstoppable rhythm and swing. In fact, when I listen to recordings of myself, I’m surprised to hear how much he influenced my playing, though of course watered down to my more limited technical capabilities.
My first meeting with Peterson took place a couple of years earlier. A recent hireling at Keyboard, I decided one night to drive up from the Peninsula to the Great American Music Hall, one of San Francisco’s premier medium-sized venues, where Peterson was playing a solo set. It was, as expected, exhilarating to witness. Then, after an encore or two, a bow and a wave, he exited. I’m not normally an impulsive person, but at that moment I made a decided to try and get backstage and introduce myself.
Now, getting backstage is never a simple matter. Usually you’re shooed away, unless you have proper credentials, which I didn’t have. But that night the stage door was wide open, with no security keeping watch. I headed into the hallway, turned a couple of corners, and suddenly there, alone, sat Oscar Peterson, smiling warmly as I peeked into his dressing room.
“Come on in!” he said. “Have a seat! What’s your name?”
I introduced myself. He asked how I liked his performance. This led to about a ten-minute conversation, which I left on a cloud, feeling as if my career as a big-shot music journalist had just begun.
Our next meeting is documented here. It stretched on for several hours. The first thirty minutes or so were devoted to Oscar's early experimentation with synthesizers and keyboards. These were hot topics at the time but now seem archaic and certainly not germane to his pianistic legacy. So I’ve skipped over all that and begun with what followed, which I believe takes all of us, pianists as well as listeners, into the heart of this great artist.
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Would you say that there’s been a renewed interest in acoustic piano in jazz?
Yes, a great interest. And you know why? You’ll probably get letters on this, but the hell with it: It represents in some way more of a challenge than the electronics. I’ve studied with a gentleman I respect very highly: Ed Walsh, who happens to know a hell of a lot about synthesizers, so I know what I’m talking about. It’s one thing to know synthesis; it’s another thing to know acoustic instruments – I’m speaking generally now, not of any individual cases. A lot of the youngsters I see trying out various instruments in music stores are all playing the same type of thing. They all play a line that runs up in whatever cadence, with a little modulation at the end of the line. I’m not putting it down where there’s a call for it. I’m just wondering if this is their total capability.
You’re saying that preparation for the next generation of jazz pianists isn’t adequate?
Definitely. What I’m really afraid of is the effect of too much availability of all the keyboard instruments. Years ago, when you stepped up to a piano and touched a key, it made one specific sound. Today you can walk up and touch a key, and while you’re doing that you can press a button and the sound will change from one thing to something else and then to something else again, since there’s a whole lot of sounds available. So the problem right now is that we don’t have as many keyboard players as we think we have. We have a lot of linear players.
Yes, but just because some young musician prefers creating music on an electronic instrument, that doesn’t mean that his or her music isn’t as valid as someone else’s expression on a piano.
That’s right, but the tragic thing here is that there are an awful lot of players around who don’t know that they aren’t total keyboard players, for lack of a better phrase. I’m sure they are going to be surprised one day: If they’re ever faced with having to play a complete keyboard, they’ll be very disappointed. I don’t say that mastering the keyboard is mandatory; I’m just saying that it seems like there are an awful lot of single-line players today, but there are only so many calls for that sort of thing, just like there are only so many calls for trumpet, piano or whatever.
Interpretion or Improvisation?
Did you ever consider building your career in classical music?
At one point I started to, but I found the regimentation perhaps a little too much for me, where you had to do this piece with this trend of thought in mind and the interpretation had to run this way. So I decided to go my own way. To me, a classical player is an interpreter, a creator in that particular way. A jazz player is a raw improvisationalist. That’s the way it has to stay for it to be jazz. The blues has to be part of it for it to be jazz or you lose the whole context of what this music is all about.
“I’m not ashamed of the blues.”
You know, in some circles, blues seems to be a dirty word. I saw a review somewhere that said, “This piece reverted to being a twelve-bar blues.” I’m not ashamed of the blues. The blues is a definitive part of jazz history and of my playing. I want it to stay that way. I don’t want it to ever change, because if it does then it throws me in with … maybe not [Vladimir] Horowitz but with the classical end, and that is not what I’m doing.
Is there a stylistic delineation between a blues phrase and a jazz phrase?
Well, I’ll put it this way: To me, a jazz phrase can’t be a jazz phrase without a certain type of blues feeling to it. That doesn’t mean it must be premeditated. It just means you have to have that feel to it. If someone tries to play the blues, that’s the quickest way of knowing where they’re at jazzwise, in my book. I have seen so-called prolific players humbled by the simplest of players who could play the blues. This is something that has to remain, otherwise it’s another music. There is a hell of a lot of music with the label “jazz” on it, especially when it crosses over in fusion record companies. Everything is jazz! Well, I don’t buy that crap. This is not jazz. You don’t devise it in the front office of a recording company. It’s done creatively.
I’m seeing lots of players, though, who don’t seem too concerned with that. I mean, Keith Jarrett is delivering what are essentially recitals in a classical format, with at least as many roots in classical music as in jazz. So where do you draw the line? Or, why draw it at all, between these approaches?
I don’t know. I did a session last night with the three greatest jazz trumpet players in the world, to my way of thinking [Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry and Freddie Hubbard]. And there was no question about what was going on there, from the moment when the first notes were struck. There would be questions at other types of concerts, let me put it that way. I don’t want to get into the personalities; that’s not the idea. There is just no question when a jazz player of any note or talent sits down to play. You know immediately what you’re listening to. When Horowitz sits down to play, it’s the same thing. But there are a lot of things on the airwaves that, if I heard them without any announcement, would leave me thinking, “Now, what is that supposed to be?” … What we have to face today, whether it be on piano or any other instrument, is that there are fewer and fewer jazz musicians.
Is that good, bad or neither?
I think it’s a shame. We do have some talents coming up, and I’m not going to judge them. But when you had people like Ben Webster, you had people later on like Charlie Parker. You can look in the obituary column, then look around today, and you can come to only one conclusion, which is that this particular music is drawing to an end. Whatever the new music is, that’s another bag. There’s a great void because on the one hand you have the record people trying to shovel everything into the jazz bag to make whatever they want to sell. And on the critical end you have people being overly investigative of what people play and how they play it. That isn’t at all necessary, A player either has talent or they don’t. It’s that simple. It’s not a matter of oversimplifying it either. You can break down Art Tatum’s playing and say, “Yeah, he did this, this and this.” The problem is, why did he do it? And how come nobody has come up and done that since?
You know, some writers have said that jazz ended when the original musicians started playing off of charts rather than improvising around head arrangements.
The historians weren’t playing, right? That’s where it’s at for me. I’ll buy what the players say. I have to respect the players. You can be as analytical as you want about what somebody has played. I respect that. But it’s the players who count in the end. When I hear Dizzy or Joe Pass make a musical statement, there’s no question about it. But something that’s written in a newspaper or a magazine or a book, when they say this and that happened musically, that doesn’t mean anything to me. If I hear it, I know where it’s at.
Hot Chops
Is it necessary to have technique on your instrument as strong as yours to play jazz well? Or can one be just as expressive with less powerful chops?
Oh, I think obviously you can. I’m a great believer in the individual. There probably has to be a player around like myself, with that kind of dexterity, and I’m not ashamed of that at all. But you can’t have only one kind of anything. That’s why I’ve enjoyed so many of the players who would certainly fall into the category of being less technically accomplished. I can enjoy them within the realms of their capabilities. It may not be what I want to listen to pianistically for the rest of my life, but it’s a change in the weather. This is why I used to enjoy Erroll Garner. He made no bones about what he did or didn’t play. The funny thing is, though, Erroll had an incredible technique, with octaves that I could never master. Erroll Garner could play octaves faster, almost, than I could play a single line. But they haven’t noticed that yet [laughs].
I’m actually blown away by your double, two-handed octaves.
Yeah, but he used to play ‘em with one hand, like Horowitz! You know, I’ve been chuckling over the years at how the critics relegate Erroll to being a certain type of pianist technically and to me being another. Ray Brown and I used to go hear him, and when he’d pull off one of those things, we’d both sort of rear back in our seats and say, “Good God!” He had that kind of command – and at up-tempo, where I wouldn’t dare try it. What made it even more amazing was that it wasn’t a matter of just running in uneven movements. He’d do it maybe three or four notes back down, skipping a few on the way, then come back on a different route, all in a rapid sequence of octaves. I’d sit there and say, “I can’t believe it!” But people never seemed to hear that.
“So-called ‘soul playing’ has turned into a whore’s paradise.”
And if you talked with him afterwards and asked him how he did it, he might not be able to tell you.
That’s right. He wasn’t aware of it. To me, that’s a type of nerve playing. But by the same token, I think that so-called soul playing turned into a whore’s paradise. Various pianists who never could play have memorized a certain amount of those so-called blues licks, and they get away with it. All right, so they make a living on it. The ones who are truly the stark players of the blues medium, fine. They still do something for me.
Since we’re talking about Garner’s octave playing, could you tell us how you developed your fingering on octave lines? We just agreed that if you asked Garner this question, he might not have an answer, but nonetheless …
Well, I know how I developed mine. It was out of frustration. I wanted to be able to play certain lines with a greater impetus in certain areas. When you’re on with a total rhythm section working behind you at a reasonable clip, you sometimes want your lines to stand out a little more. It’s almost like when you hear a trumpet section play a line, and then you hear them take it up an octave.
To categorize the process very simply, the first thing I had to teach myself was that what the right hand played had nothing to do with what the left hand was going to play, and vice versa. From what I’ve seen in teaching, most pianists say to themselves, “If I’m going to play something this way with my right hand, I can do the same thing with my left hand because the little finger becomes a thumb.” It does not work, and you waste an awful lot of time trying to figure that out. The structures of the hands are totally different, so you have to approach them that way. The first thing I had to develop was strength in the fourth finger of my left hand, because that’s what I use as the thumb, as the striking force. The same goes for the right hand, incidentally. A lot of the runs that many people start with their thumb I start with my fourth or little finger.
Do you characteristically start a run at a certain point in the chord – the third or the sixth, assuming that you begin with your fourth or fifth finger?
Yes, many times, only because I always felt as a youngster that there was a weakness in that end of my left hand. The natural tendency always seemed to be to start with the thumb, second or third finger, and it bugged me to the point that I began to feel an imbalance in the hand, so I worked on trying to balance out with the other fingers.
Are there still areas in your technique that you’d like to improve?
Oh, yeah. One of the things I’d really like to get a better command of is phrasing, within the context of playing lines. Articulation is the biggest problem for me in the way of technical playing. It’s a perennial hassle. It has ruined more ideas that come to me as I play because they didn’t have the proper articulation behind them. Of course, being a player who can play at fairly rapid tempos, I have to be very careful not to lose that articulation: Don’t overdo it, but don’t lose it. That is the first thing that goes when I’m tired. It bugs me.
How does being tired affect you?
When I get road-weary, actually fatigued, it’s more of a mental lapse. For some reason I just don’t put the proper inflections in the right places.
Audiences
In my opinion, Oscar Peterson in Russia might be your best live recording. What gets me, though, is how quiet the audience is. You don’t hear the shouts or applause that you hear from American listeners after an especially hot solo, for example. Did that throw you off at all?
Not really. I’m a very selfish person. If I were going to play tonight, around five o’clock all other activities, whatever they may be, would cease. I get myself psyched up, so once I walk onstage there can be a house full of gorillas and it wouldn’t bother me, as long as I know that they’re going to be in some way responsive, or at least sit in their seats and not create a riot. I’m sure that if you feel that an audience is with you, it gives you a push. It’s the same as if you suddenly look up and see one of your peers standing in the wings: If he’s a player, you know you’ll play a lot harder. Where that comes from, I don’t know. The juices start to run. The competitive thing takes place. It’s pride, or whatever you want to call it. I know it’s there for me, and once I walk out there, giving a performance is all I’m thinking about.
Do you know what you’re going to play when you walk out?
No. This is one of the problems of doing symphonic programs. If it’s something with orchestra you always have to let ‘em know what you’re doing, but often impresarios will call and say, “What is Oscar going to play? Can you send us a program?” All I do is send a list of probables and say, “Take your choice, because I don’t necessarily think that I can guarantee I’ll want to play “Rainy Day” on position three in the second half of the concert. I’m going to go out there and do what I want to do, and what I feel could be best at that moment. I don’t want to be restrained by having to deal with a predetermined list I’d picked eight months ago.
Do you often try out tunes or ideas in concert that you’ve never tried or conceived of before?
That’s right. It’s fun, but you can get in a lot of trouble that way. It’s all part of the growing process, the concert process, and certainly part of the jazz process. I’ve suddenly played a new thing on the way out of a tune at a concert, okay? Within the last six bars, suddenly something comes up and I say, “Hey!” So I may start another chorus or two because of that, and I think that’s healthy.
Have you ever gotten so far into a new idea in a performance that you’ve gotten lost and had to pull back to the mainstream somehow?
Yeah. I’ve gone around the famous maypole [laughs]. And I’ve done the opposite too, where I was enthralled with something and I was going to do it again, then suddenly it doesn’t work and you start to say, “Wait a minute. Where was I trying to get to?” Then you know you’re in trouble.
Have you tried playing in unusual time signatures?
Not too much, no. I’m of the belief that they don’t really swing that much at all, jazz-wise, for me. It may represent a challenge to some players. If I were going to do that, I’d much prefer to do it with a rhythm section. Let them lay it down for me, then I’ll cope with it. But I would not want to go through myself. Rhythmically, I’ll often play constricting and expanding time. I used to do that even with the trio many times, play a floating line over what they were laying down. It’s fun. It’s an exercise in something, but I couldn’t be a continual player like that.
Do you play your own compositions differently, perhaps with a different sort of sympathy for what the notes are because of your intimacy with the music, than how you’d play a standard? Or are your own tunes just additional pieces in the program?
That's a very tough question. I like to think that I have an empathy with my own compositions. But I just redid one of the tunes from The Silent Partner, the “Theme for Celine,” and I used a large string orchestra. Afterwards I did it with a group in Toronto. Peter Leitch was the guitarist, and what he played on it really intrigued me because that was precisely what I would have loved to have played on it had I been doing a guitar solo. So I can’t really think that I have more empathy than someone else if the tune appeals to that person.
That’s the secret. We did that tune on the Pablo Silent Partner album, and everyone from Bags [vibraphonist Milt Jackson] through Betty Carter fell in love with it the minute they heard it. We sometimes think we can do better with our own stuff, but when we hear how simpatico people like Peter and Jackson and Betty are, you have to wonder. Now, if I write something specifically for the piano, I think I can empathize better with it than other people, because it’s my tune. I know exactly what I want to have go where.
It’s a whole other kick, though, to set your ideas down in music and hear the new twists other people come up with.
It’s exciting because it gives you a different viewpoint. In this case, happily, I loved what I heard. There may be cases in the future, if more of my music is played, where I may not like what I hear, but that’s the risk you take.
The Accompanist’s Art
You’ve accompanied some of the best singers in jazz. Do you have any insights about how to connect with both the singer and the material?
Well, I think the secret is to be able to become almost a nonentity and yet retain your own musical personality. That seems like a double entendre, but it isn’t. You have to recede, get out of the singer’s way, but you have to be there when they need you, because there are times that they may overextend themselves, or they may need that boost to make them extend themselves more. The big question is, when do they need it? You have to feed them that particular medicine at the right time because as their accompanist you actually know them better than the listener, or supposedly you do, so you should be able to sense when there’s the slightest bit of uncertainty and then answer it in such a way that they think, “Oh, that’s right! That’s where that is!” The cardinal rule, of course, is to never create upheaval. The greatest accompanist in the world right now is Hank Jones. No one touches Hank for playing with a singer.
One of your first sessions was as an accompanist, for Billie Holiday.
It was unusual because I’d never worked with Billie and obviously had heard of some of her idiosyncrasies with the people she worked with. However, it turned out that Billie loved what I was doing. I specifically remember the record date. She called different tunes and, happily, I happened to know all of them.
There were no charts?
No. Billie was a very off-the-cuff person in that way. She’d look at you and say, “Oh, come on! You know that tune!” And that meant you did know it. Thank God it wasn’t “Prelude to a Kiss” [laughs]. Really, that could have been a horn date. It was a trading of musical ideas, and I enjoyed it.
You’ve worked a fair amount with Ella Fitzgerald too.
Now, Ella is a different type of vocalist. First of all, she has tremendous ears, and if anyone knows jazz lines, she does. No one should ever delude themselves into thinking she doesn’t.
She’s an improviser.
That’s right, and thank God she doesn’t play an instrument, other than harmonica! She does that very well, by the way. The thing with Ella is, you have to be careful not to get carried away by her. In other words, when she gets into jazz singing, she can really get into it, and you have to watch that you don’t overstep your bounds with exuberance.
Sassy [Sarah Vaughan] is a very expansive singer. She overwhelms you with sound. The time almost floats too, so you can’t really play strict time behind her – and yet you have to. Again, it’s a double-meaning thing. You can’t let it have that feeling that it’s one-two-three-four, but that should be there anyway, built in, so that you can expand and contract instrumentally with what she does vocally.
Will you do any more recording with Count Basie?
Maybe. That might have run its course. You’d really have to have a vehicle that demands or asks for something new in that kind of treatment. It’s a kick to work with Basie, though.
How did you affect each other’s playing?
Well, obviously I became a lot more sparse than usual. I think it would have sounded horrible if I’d played as much as I normally do. It would have been a terrible mismatch, with too much disparity. The idea is to come together. Actually, I think Basie plays more on those albums sometimes than he’s been recently playing.
In your last interview with Keyboard, you told the story of how Norman Granz discovered you by hearing you perform on a taxi driver’s radio on his way to the airport, at which point he ordered the driver to turn around, tracked you down and the rest is history. What if the cab driver happened to have the radio off or turned to a different station? Would you have been content with working as a more regional musician?
Oh, I might have taken a shot at it somehow.
By leaving for the big city?
I might have, yeah. There’s a good chance of that, because that’s one of the problems with working locally. It’s a little better today, because the level of local playing is obviously up by so many points, it isn’t even funny. But if you’re a player of whatever merit, you outgrow a certain environment. It’s not even fair to compare the kind of gigs you’d leave there with the Jazz At The Philharmonic concerts [all-star jazz concerts organized by Granz in the Fifties, at which Peterson made his first impact]. If you’re playing in a nightclub with a band or combo, that’s a lot different than being in direct competition every night with other players – and I mean competition! It doesn’t matter if they’re on different instruments: You’re following someone with a solo. That was the great thing about Jazz At The Phil: It was totally competitive, regardless of the criticisms of the honking that some players were doing. That had nothing to do with me. I knew what they were trying to do when I was up there. I was looking for blood, and I’m sure that anybody who wanted to be honest about Jazz At The Phil and knew the players would tell you the same thing. I know when the trio was ready to go on we looked at who we were on with every year. We’d hold a meeting and say, “Oh, the Gene Krupa Quartet? Right [laughs]!” You were always coping with someone in front of you or following you.
“Some people … become great players. Other people just add to the drone.”
How do you see yourself in the story of jazz piano?
I see myself as an innovator on the instrument. Jazz piano was steadily falling into a rut when I came to the scene. We all fall prey to stylistic epidemics, I’m afraid, which is good in some ways and bad in others. Some people evolve out of that and become great players. Other people just add to the drone. At that time the Bud Powell era was in full swing, and although that was a great contribution, I don’t think it covers the whole jazz piano scene. I happen to be a fan of Bud, but I think that if my playing did nothing else, it made people realize that you could do a lot more with the instrument than perhaps was being done in some areas of jazz at that particular time.
I think it also gave a lot of players confidence that they didn’t have to be hamstrung by the very prolific horn players. Many times on a record, and even in jam sessions, the piano solo was almost like an intermission break. You hear these tremendous horn players, and then after the tenor and trombone players get through, they give you the piano player – and it’s time to run and get a beer before the soloists start playing again. Well, it didn’t have to be that way. The piano is a valid instrument in its own right, and hopefully my playing may have at least stabilized the validity of the piano soloist within a group and also, recently, outside of a group.
Not only your playing, but also your demeanor may have contributed to that aspect of jazz piano. For instance, your insistence that drinks not be served once you begin performing in a club helps create a climate where people really listen to what’s being played.
I hope so. A lot of things are taken for granted in this world. You have to draw the line somewhere. If you believe in certain things, you have to say to yourself, “Okay, I believe this is of particular merit and that I can do it well. So if I’m honest enough to come out here and lay it on the line, give me the courtesy of at least being able to present my case.” That’s what it all adds up to for me.
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Great interview.
You can find him in the Dick Cavett archives on YouTube, and he was incredibly articulate. He could demonstrate almost any style of playing and talk about it intelligently.
I'm so sorry I never heard him play in person.
Great interview, thanks!!