Oscar Peterson Gentle Waltz Pdf

[Channing Arther]

Anextremely gifted pianist with astonishing technique and an elegant touch on ballads, Canadian jazz musician Oscar Peterson burst on the scene in the 1940s as the heir apparent to the great Art Tatum. A gentle man from Montreal, Peterson was a favorite on the Jazz at the Philharmonic circuit during the late '40s and later established an exquisite chemistry with the world-class rhythm tandem of bassist Ray Brown and drummer Ed Thigpen. This was Peterson's working trio from 1959 through 1966, and together they made several classy recordings for the Verve label, including successful Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers & Hart songbooks. Their appearance at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival came on the heels of their collaboration with arranger Nelson Riddle, renowned for his gorgeous, easy-listening collaborations with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

The Peterson trio makes a big impression coming out of the gate with a hip arrangement of "Fly Me to the Moon" that is brimming over with clever re-harmonizations, tightly executed unison lines at the top between pianist and bassist, and an irrepressible, interactive sense of swing from Thigpen. Peterson's frenetic, swinging lines are his calling card here, steeped in the tradition of his piano heroes Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole, and Art Tatum. The trio's inventive 4/4 take on "Someday My Prince Will Come," the gentle waltz tune introduced in the 1939 Disney animated feature Snow White and later covered by the Miles Davis Quintet in their 1961 recording of the same name, has Peterson swinging nonchalantly while extrapolating on the familiar theme with some dazzling right hand lines. Brown anchors this jaunty four-on-the-floor number with his resounding tones and inimitable walking groove while Thigpen again plays it interactively and intuitively on the kit, responding to Peterson's accents and phrasing while simultaneously keeping the momentum moving forward with his unerring time feel.

Peterson's melancholy ballad "Nightingale," which appeared on the Oscar Peterson Trio & Nelson Riddle album released on Verve earlier that year, is underscored by Brown's bowed bass work at the outset and Thigpen's sensitive brushes and mallets playing throughout. By the 2:30 mark they are cooking on a low flame, swinging lightly and politely with Thigpen's brushes and hi-hat setting the tone. The dynamic gradually builds and by the 4:30 mark, with Thigpen now switched over to sticks on the kit, they are grooving hard in a Count Basie tradition. Peterson and crew close out with the up-tempo, blues-tinged swinger "Squeaky's Blues," which opens with a full 2:22 of unaccompanied virtuosity by the Canadian keyboard marvel before the rhythm section enters. Bassist Brown gets a significant solo taste at the four-minute mark against Thigpen's deftly swinging and sensitive brushwork and Peterson's sparse accompanied. Then Thigpen enters the fray with some masterfully melodic playing on the kit before the three bring this ebullient romp home in exhilarating fashion.

Born on August 15, 1925 in the poor, predominantly black neighborhood of Little Burgundy in Montreal, Peterson began playing piano at age five and by age nine had already mastered several classical pieces as well as ragtime and boogie woogie numbers. In 1940, at age 14, he won a national music competition organized by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and soon after dropped out of school to become a professional pianist, working for a weekly radio show while also playing at hotels and music halls around Montreal. In 1949, his career got a big boost when impresario Norman Granz introduced Peterson at a Jazz at the Philharmonic show at New York's Carnegie Hall. He subsequently recorded several brilliant duo and trio recordings for Granz's Clef, Norgran, and Verve labels and through his many Jazz at the Philharmonic engagements was able to play with many major jazz artists of the day, including Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Buddy Rich, Milt Jackson, Barney Kessel, Louis Armstrong, Stphane Grappelli, Ella Fitzgerald, Clark Terry, Joe Pass, Anita O'Day, Fred Astaire, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Stan Getz.

In the 1970s, Peterson formed another landmark trio with virtuoso guitarist Joe Pass and Danish bassist Niels-Henning rsted Pedersen (which emulated the success of Peterson's 1950s trio with guitarist Herb Ellis and bassist Ray Brown.) Through the 1970s, he participated in several all-star sessions for Granz's new label, Pablo Records, with the likes of Count Basie, Roy Eldridge, Zoot Sims, Joe Pass, Clark Terry, Freddie Hubbard, Benny Carter, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Dizzy Gillespie. In the 1980s, he played successfully in a duo with pianist Herbie Hancock. Following a stroke in 1993, Peterson returned to pubic performances on a limited basis beginning in 1995 and also made several live trio recordings for the Telarc label.

In 1997, he received a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement and an International Jazz Hall of Fame Award. In 1999, he joined forces with longtime friends and colleagues Ray Brown on bass and Milt Jackson on vibraphones for the Telarc recording The Very Tall Band: Live at the Blue Note. His last recording, 2004's A Night in Vienna, was released on Verve and featured guitarist Ulf Wakenius, bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson, and drummer Martin Drew. Peterson died of kidney failure on December 23, 2007.

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My reason for writing the present book is that I wishto record certain impressions of a vanished generationwhile I remember them clearly and sympathetically; myexcuse for publishing it is that the opinions and recollectionsof middle life are so seldom articulate. Reminiscencesof childhood, where they survive undimmed, findtheir place in fiction and in autobiography; reminiscencesof youth and manhood, collected and chastened fromthe sober angle of old age, are compressed into onepatronising chapter of every standard life; but we arehardly ever allowed to look through the spectacles ofthirty at the world as it appears to the eyes of thirty.Sometimes we are, indeed, admitted to the intimacy ofa diary; but, if it has been composed with a view topublication, we may suspect that behind the pretext of[x]self-communing the author is striking an attitude; if itwas never intended for publication, we may wonderwhether it should ever have been published. Possiblythere is still room for recollections that have franklybeen written for publication before age has too greatlyblurred the outline of memory or distance eliminated tooruthlessly the unimportant.

As the art of the novelist demands of him that heshould first and foremost be a spectator of life, so theaccident of race makes of him an involuntary critic ifhis lot be cast amid alien surroundings, however congenial;and the further accident of health not alwaysrobust may remove him a yet greater distance from theactive life of his generation. In so far as this detachmentgives him a separate standard of comparison, itmay be not without value in the review of past mannersand ideals.

It is with the life of that generation and not withgossip about this or that member of it that I am concerned.A new and inexcusable terror is added to socialintercourse when the confidence, the indiscretion or themalice of a dinner-table is industriously recorded andpublished; and it is still believed by some who weretrained in a tradition of reticence that intimate portraitsand studies should be withheld so long as the originalsor their friends can be offended or hurt by unsoughtpublicity. While a man of even thirty-three, spendingmost of his life in London, may have met more than afew of the statesmen and financiers, the sailors and soldiers,the artists, authors and actors who have now chiefplace in the interest of their countrymen, I feel thatit would be impudent for him publicly to scatter hisunsolicited opinion on those whom he has been invited[xi]to meet privately. This book will therefore be free fromwhat has been called an "index of improper names."

It would be no less impudent for him to assume thatanyone is interested in the insignificances of his privatelife. I venture to write of this epoch because I hope topresent some aspects of it which might elude the historianwho ranges over a wider field, preeminently theaspect from the standpoint of youth. Any autobiographicalmatter deserves no more honourable place thana footnote and is included only to explain how and whyone super was found at certain times on a certain stage.

The generation which ended with the Peace of Versaillesin 1919 is likely to be cut off from all that followsmore completely than any of which we have record: ahigher proportion of its youth has been destroyed, andof those who remain hardly one has been left in theplace that he filled before the war; the standard and distributionof wealth have changed; and former lines ofsocial demarcation have been obliterated. Though theold forms continue, the life that inspires them is new:the schools and universities, the learned professions andpublic services, the government itself are manned froma different class and actuated by different ideals. Itmay be not altogether wasted labour to sketch a cornerof that old world as it was known to the men who werereared in time to be sacrificed in the late war.

Impelled by a common interest in changing fashions,Professor Sir Denison Ross, Mr. Hugo Rumbold and Ionce agreed to compile an encyclopdia of the catch-wordsand cant phrases, the popular songs and populardances, the endearments and greetings of the last twentyyears; though the work has not yet been begun, I amnot without hope that there may be published in our lifetime[xii]a social survey of England which shall contain somefew of the things commonly considered to be below thedignity of history, for the change in manners during thelast generation is worthy of an exhaustive treatise; it isat once the effect and the cause of a correspondingchange in morals; and, whatever progress the futurehave in store, those who first drew breath in Queen Victoria'sreign may congratulate themselves, if it be amatter for congratulation, on having passed in thirtyyears from the civilisation of the Stone Age to that ofthe Cities of the Plain.

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