Oscar Peterson

The Pablo trio. When Norman Granz founded Pablo Records in 1973, one of his first productions was this encounter between Peterson, Joe Pass, and the young Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. The three of them became Peterson's primary working ensemble for the rest of the decade, and this first recording captures the excitement of a new configuration discovering what it can do.

Pass's guitar is stylistically different from Herb Ellis's: more single-note oriented, more clearly bebop-influenced, with a tone that sits differently in the frequency range. NHOP is simply one of the great jazz bassists of any era: his tone, his time, his melodic conception. The trio plays with a freedom and mutual responsiveness that recalls the best moments of the Ellis-Brown-Peterson group, updated for the 1970s and better documented sonically.

Tallinn, Estonia, November 1974. Peterson playing to Soviet audiences who had access to very little Western jazz and responded with something close to religious intensity. The concert is structured in three layers: solo piano, then duos with NHØP, then the full trio with Jake Hanna on drums. The concert documents a kind of cultural exchange that doesn't happen the same way anymore: music as genuine communication across a hard border, with no commercial infrastructure behind it.

Peterson plays with awareness of the occasion. There's a performance here, not showboating but a conscious effort to represent the music at its highest level. The audience responses between pieces are wonderful: entranced, not quite sure how to respond to music that makes no concessions to their expectations. The solo piano selections open the album with an intimacy that draws the crowd in before the bass and drums expand the palette.

Peterson as accompanist to five trumpet players: Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and the young Jon Faddis, each in their own session. It's a summation of the trumpet tradition from Eldridge's pre-bop fire through Dizzy's bebop authority, Terry's scampering trumpet work, and Edison's laid-back swing, with Faddis representing the next generation. Peterson's accompaniment adapts to each player without losing his own identity.

Behind Dizzy he's more harmonically adventurous, chasing the changes through their extensions; behind Edison he lays back, leaving space, emphasizing the blues root. The Gillespie session is probably the finest of the five: two musicians who shared the same musical DNA, playing together with the ease of a long friendship and the discipline of long experience.

The Montreux Jazz Festival, 1977: a loose, celebratory jam session format with Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, and Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis coming through the front line. These Pablo live recordings from the 1970s have a particular atmosphere: the relaxed quality of musicians playing for each other as much as for the audience, the festival context providing freedom from commercial expectations and from the pressure of a formal set.

Peterson in jam session mode is always interesting. He's one of the great accompanists in the music, and in the open format of a festival jam he plays different roles in quick succession: soloist, accompanist, ensemble member. The different players who come through push him into unexpected places, and you can hear him enjoying the surprises. A document of late-70s Pablo festival culture at its most characteristic.

The companion Montreux recording puts Peterson in an unusual trio with two bassists: Ray Brown and NHØP. Each brings a different personality to the accompaniment role, and you can hear Peterson responding to the differences. It's essentially a listening test: the same pianist, the same musical language, two very different bassists side by side.

Ray Brown, of course, is the standard against which all others are measured. His reunion with Peterson at Montreux has a quality of deep familiarity: two musicians who know each other's playing so well that conversation is the only accurate word for what they do together. NHOP's playing is more exploratory, with more rhythmic independence between bass and piano. Both are excellent. Both are instructive in different ways.

A contemporary-sounding production that shows Peterson trying to engage with the post-fusion landscape in a way that doesn't entirely work. The electric keyboards, the processed sound, the attempt at a "modern" aesthetic: these all feel external to what Peterson does naturally. The production frames him in ways that sand down the distinctive roughness of his musical personality.

The underlying playing is still fine. You cannot make Oscar Peterson play badly. But Night Child is the low point of the Pablo period and an object lesson in the kind of compromise that happens when jazz musicians try to meet pop halfway without being sure which direction they're walking from. For Peterson completists; others can skip it and go directly to The Personal Touch.

The reunion with Stéphane Grappelli, the veteran French swing violinist whose roots went back to the Hot Club de France sessions with Django Reinhardt in the 1930s, gives Peterson an unexpected conversation partner. Grappelli's sound is light, bright, melodically spontaneous in a way that's entirely different from the horn players Peterson usually shared space with. The combination is warmer and more playful than expected.

Joe Pass, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and Mickey Roker complete the group, and the five of them generate a distinctive warmth. Grappelli's violin gives the music a European melodic quality that Peterson rarely encountered; his long-phrased, singing lines pull Peterson toward a more cantabile approach. "How 'Bout You" is particularly good. A late-period pleasure.

A collection of songs by or popularized by Canadians, with Peterson singing as well as playing piano. Clark Terry's flugelhorn adds warmth to the arrangements, and Ed Bickert's guitar provides a characteristically gentle harmonic cushion. Peterson's vocal work here is not revelatory, but it's sincere, and the project's concept, a tribute to Canadian songwriting, gives it a personal dimension that the standard Pablo blowing sessions sometimes lack.

The group arrangements mix originals and standards, and the interplay between Peterson and Terry is particularly fine on the slower material. Dave Young on bass and Jerry Fuller on drums provide a supportive foundation. The album has a different quality from the pure jazz records: more relaxed, more domestic, more conscious of an audience beyond the jazz world.

One of the great surprises in the Peterson catalog. Recorded live at the 1981 Montreux Jazz Festival, this trio with NHOP and Terry Clarke is Peterson at his most rhythmically engaged. The title composition, inspired by Peterson's interest in African musical traditions, anchors the set with a driving, polyrhythmic energy that pushes the trio into new territory.

The trio is at its most percussive here. The piano's bass register sounds like drums; the left-hand stride patterns take on a weight that feels grounded in something older and deeper than bebop. Terry Clarke is an inspired choice for this material, his cymbal work creating a shimmering rhythmic backdrop that gives Peterson and NHOP room to explore the African-influenced grooves. One of the most alive live Peterson records in any period.

Recorded live in Tokyo in February 1982 with the "Big 4" lineup, this is Peterson with Joe Pass, NHOP, and Martin Drew playing for a Japanese audience with audible enthusiasm. There is no title track; the closest is the medley of Peterson's own "Hymn to Freedom" and "The Fallen Warrior," a long-form performance that moves through contrasting sections and gives all four musicians extended space. The interplay between Peterson and Pass is particularly sharp on the uptempo material, both feeding off the energy of the room.

Freedom Song benefits from the live setting: there are moments of genuine spontaneity that studio albums from this period sometimes lack. NHOP's bass work throughout is extraordinary, particularly on the slower pieces where he's given room to construct melodic statements rather than walking lines. A strong, underrated album from the Pablo period's final chapter.

Tadd Dameron's standard "If You Could See Me Now" is the centerpiece. Dameron's composition deserved more recordings than it received, and Peterson's version, slow, harmonically rich, almost hymn-like in its gravity, is one of the finest. The slow tempo exposes Peterson's ability to fill musical time with meaning rather than with notes: every chord extension is intentional, every pause is part of the structure.

The rest of the program is standards and originals: Miles Davis's "Weird Blues," "If I Should Lose You," "Limehouse Blues," and the two originals "L'impossible" and "On Danish Shore." Peterson plays this music with deep respect and technical mastery.

A late-period live recording that shows Peterson still operating at a very high level in his early 60s. The program is mostly standards and Peterson originals, played with a quartet whose members are less individually famous than the classic configurations but who play together with discipline and warmth. The recording has a clarity and presence that the earlier Pablo live albums sometimes lack.

The technique at this point is somewhat more restrained than the explosive Verve period: not diminished, but economized. He's stopped playing every idea that occurs to him and started choosing which ones to actually play. The editing improves the music. The Perdido / Caravan medley is outstanding here, played with the authority of someone who has been living with these songs for forty years.

Recorded at the same Westwood Playhouse sessions as Oscar Peterson Live!, this companion album captures the quartet in a more reflective mode. Where the Live! album leaned uptempo, Time After Time favors ballads and medium tempos, and Peterson's piano has a presence and warmth that the intimate venue drew out naturally.

"Time After Time" is played straight, no irony, no technical show: just the melody and the harmony and the feeling it produces. Peterson in this mood is sometimes underestimated because the virtuosity is more latent than demonstrative. But the control required to play simply and expressively is greater than the control required to play fast and complicated. This album is proof of that.