Oscar Peterson

Peterson was 25 when this was recorded at Carnegie Hall, with his Montreal trio of Ben Johnson on guitar and Auston Roberts on bass. Norman Granz had brought him down from Montreal for a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert, and the crowd reaction was so strong it launched his entire American career. The program covers stride, bebop, and his own developing style, demonstrating a command of the full keyboard tradition that had no real precedent for someone his age.

The playing is astonishing. The touch is already fully formed: that big orchestral left hand, the right-hand runs that live somewhere between Tatum and bebop. Johnson and Roberts know the material cold, staying out of the way when Peterson builds momentum and locking in when he settles into a groove. Some pieces have the slightly over-demonstrative quality of a 25-year-old who knows he can do anything and wants to prove it. That energy never fully disappeared, but here it is still finding its shape, still raw around the edges in the best possible way.

The Verve songbook series gets all the attention, but this earlier Mercury version of the Cole Porter program shows how Peterson was already thinking about the songbook format years before those records. The approach is different here: more improvisational, less polished, more directly alive. Peterson plays these tunes as fresh material rather than repertoire.

His connection to the American songbook was always deep. He understood how these songs were constructed, where the harmony wanted to move, which notes were structural and which were decorative. Cole Porter suited him particularly well: the sophisticated harmonies, the melodic lines that could be stretched and twisted, the inherent swing of the better tunes. "Night and Day" and "I Love Paris" are both outstanding.

Recorded in 1952 and 1953 for Clef, Granz's label before Verve absorbed it, the Rodgers session shows Peterson's command of straight melodic material. Barney Kessel is on guitar, the trio's original guitarist before Herb Ellis replaced him in 1953. Kessel's approach is subtly different from the Ellis sound that would follow: a little more angular, a little more bop-inflected, but no less sympathetic a partner.

Rodgers wrote different songs than Porter: more earnest, more structurally predictable in some ways, which paradoxically gave Peterson more room to work with the harmony and rhythm. "My Favorite Things" is here before Coltrane got to it, and Peterson's version is a completely different animal: swinging hard, taking the changes through bop vocabulary, treating it as a vehicle rather than a portrait.

This is one of the great live jazz recordings of the 1950s, full stop. Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, Oscar Peterson in a small theater in Stratford, Ontario, and nobody is showing off. They are just playing, and playing at an extraordinary level. The trio had been together three years by this point and you can hear it. They breathe together. Ellis and Brown know exactly what Peterson is going to do half a beat before he does it.

"How High the Moon" is the showpiece, but the real revelation is the rhythm section's independence. Brown's bass plays its own melodic line underneath Peterson's runs in a way that feels genuinely contrapuntal, not accompaniment. Ellis's comping hits the holes so precisely it sounds arranged. It wasn't. That's the miracle of this trio at its peak: music that sounds composed but was made up on the spot, in front of an audience, on a warm summer night in Ontario.

The Newport Jazz Festival, 1957, and Peterson's trio backs three of the harder-swinging soloists in jazz: Sonny Stitt on alto and tenor, Roy Eldridge on trumpet, and Jo Jones providing a second rhythm voice alongside Brown and Ellis. What you get is something close to a pickup session: everyone responding to everyone else, the energy staying high for the whole set without ever tipping into chaos.

Stitt is particularly good here, burning through the changes with that fluency that always sounded like it cost him nothing. Eldridge's trumpet is brighter and more brash, with moments that sound like he's still playing opposite Krupa in the 1940s, which is not a criticism. Peterson holds it all together without dominating. He's one of the most selfless accompanists of his generation when the situation calls for it.

Midtown Manhattan, 1958, and this is Peterson's trio in a more intimate, after-hours setting. The program is ballads and mid-tempo pieces, and the approach throughout is conversational rather than demonstrative. Herb Ellis plays with tremendous delicacy here, using space differently than on the concert recordings, and the whole session has a warmth that the bigger venues sometimes crowd out.

The trio was approaching the end of its first major configuration. Ellis would leave in 1958 and Peterson decided to drop guitar from the rhythm section entirely, going with piano-bass-drums, more traditional and giving each instrument a cleaner role. This recording catches the Ellis-Brown-Peterson group in a reflective mood, and there is something elegiac about it in retrospect: the last quiet hour of a remarkable working relationship.

Amsterdam, April 1958. The Concertgebouw is one of the great concert halls in the world, and Peterson's trio plays like they know it. The acoustics suit piano beautifully: every note has warmth and presence, Brown's bass sounds like it's six feet in front of you, Ellis's guitar has a roundness it sometimes lacks in drier recording environments. The hall brings out the best in all three instruments.

The program includes an extraordinary arrangement of "How About You" and a version of "Falling in Love with Love" that is among the most fully realized trio performances in the Peterson catalog. The interplay between Peterson and Brown throughout is something you can spend years studying: bass and piano in such close synchrony that the music seems to breathe as a single organism. This is what the Ellis-Brown-Peterson trio could do when everything clicked. One of the essential Peterson live recordings.

The Lerner-Loewe score was on every jazz musician's mind by 1958, and Peterson approached it the way he approached all show music: with harmonic literacy and deep respect for the original melody that he still felt free to ornament and extend. "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" is his clear showpiece here, played with the kind of emotional intelligence that separates a great jazz ballad from a mere pleasant one.

Ray Brown's walking bass lines behind Peterson's right-hand explorations of "On the Street Where You Live" are gorgeous in their poise. Show music suited Peterson's ensemble aesthetic especially well. The melodies were familiar enough to the audience that every departure was immediately recognizable as invention. This was a transitional trio, recorded after Herb Ellis's departure and before Ed Thigpen arrived, with Gene Gammage filling the drum chair. Despite the personnel change, the playing is assured throughout.

The first major document of the new piano-bass-drums trio: Peterson, Ray Brown, Ed Thigpen. Thigpen had replaced Herb Ellis as the non-piano voice, and the shift changes the character of everything. Without a guitar, Peterson's left hand has to fill more harmonic space. Without a chord instrument comping, the arrangements are sparser and the piano is more exposed. Peterson rose to the challenge completely.

The Jazz Soul is one of his essential recordings. "Noreen's Nocturne" is his composition, gentle and uncharacteristically restrained. Thigpen's brushes on the ballads are the finest brush drumming in the Peterson catalog. Brown sounds more prominent without Ellis's guitar occupying the frequency range above him. This is the trio that would go on to make Night Train and We Get Requests, and you can hear it finding its identity here.

Peterson loved Frank Sinatra's repertoire, and this album works through a program of songs associated with Sinatra's Capitol period. Unlike the songbook albums, this one is framed by a performer: it's not about Cole Porter's songs but about how one performer inhabited those songs, and Peterson approaches it accordingly. The pacing is more deliberate, the readings more vocally inflected.

Peterson doesn't sing, but on this album his right hand seems to channel the phrasing of a vocalist more than usual. The rubato is wider, the emotional range more explicitly Sinatrian. "I've Got You Under My Skin" swings hard in the chorus, then stretches into the verse with a lyrical freedom that Sinatra himself would have approved. Thigpen's drumming is at its most minimal here, and Brown holds the bottom with his customary authority.

The best of the Verve songbook series. Peterson had recorded Ellington's music before, but this session focuses on the core of the Ellington canon with a depth and specificity that the earlier Mercury recordings couldn't match. "Sophisticated Lady," "In a Mellotone," "Prelude to a Kiss," "Solitude": these are not songs from a fake book. They are some of the most harmonically distinctive compositions in jazz.

Peterson's understanding of Ellingtonian harmony is profound. He doesn't just play the chord changes; he inhabits the specific sonic world Ellington created, with the half-step voice movements, the characteristic pedal tones, the way certain progressions seem to evoke a full orchestra even when played by a trio. Ray Brown's arco bowing on the ballads adds another dimension. This is Peterson at his most interpretively serious, and it shows.

The Gershwin songbook was in some ways the most obvious choice and in others the hardest: everyone plays Gershwin, the songs are so well known that every interpretation is measured against a hundred others. Peterson navigates this with characteristic confidence, treating the songs not as museum pieces but as living material, taking "I Got Rhythm" through its changes at a brisk clip and letting "'S Wonderful" swing in ways Gershwin probably didn't anticipate.

The session has the trio working at full stride, with Thigpen's cymbals giving the uptempo pieces a floating quality. Brown is extraordinary on "Someone to Watch Over Me": his solo statement is one of the most moving bass moments in the entire Peterson discography, simple and perfect. A strong entry in the songbook series, if not the essential one. That distinction belongs to Ellington.