Oscar Peterson

The Blue Note club in New York, 1990. Peterson with Herb Ellis and Ray Brown: the classic guitar-bass-piano configuration reconstituted for a series of nights that everyone who was there remembers as something special. The three of them are in their mid-to-late 60s, and the playing has the authority and economy that comes only from decades of musical experience together and apart.

The reunion had a different quality than the original configuration: less to prove, more to share. The performances are generous with time, with harmonic space, with the willingness to just play the tune without doing too much to it. "How High the Moon" taken at a medium tempo is more moving than any of the blazing fast versions from 1956 or 1961. They know what the song is now. They've carried it a long time.

The companion recording from the Blue Note nights, drawn from the same 1990 engagement and featuring a different program at the same exceptional level. The encore format works because these are musicians who know how to build a performance over the course of an evening: what to play when, what the audience needs from one moment to the next, how to bring the temperature down before bringing it back up.

Ray Brown at 67 is still the most authoritative bass presence in jazz. His intonation, his time, his ability to tell a story in 16 bars: nothing has diminished. "There Is No Greater Love" with Brown's arco statement near the end is one of the finest bass moments captured in the Blue Note recordings. The guitar trio format, which Peterson had essentially invented, sounds as fresh here as it did in 1956.

A holiday album, which is exactly what it is. Peterson plays the familiar carols and holiday songs with the same technical command he brings to everything, and a Toronto-based group featuring Lorne Lofsky on guitar, Dave Young on bass, and Jerry Fuller on drums provides warm, professional support. Dave Samuels adds vibraphone and Jack Schantz contributes flugelhorn to fill out the arrangements. "O Tannenbaum" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" are the best moments: Peterson finding the harmonic depths in material most pianists treat as purely decorative.

These holiday albums occupy an uncomfortable position in any serious jazz discography: too good to dismiss, not ambitious enough to fully embrace. Peterson clearly enjoyed making it, which comes through in the playing. If you're looking for jazz Christmas music, this is probably the best available. For Peterson himself, it's a cheerful footnote to a career of considerably greater ambition.

Peterson with two of the strongest players from the younger generation: Roy Hargrove on trumpet and Ralph Moore on tenor saxophone. The encounter has the quality of a natural conversation between musicians from different generations who share the same harmonic language. It's not a mentorship session; it's a working date between equals who happen to be separated by thirty years.

Hargrove in the mid-1990s was playing at an extraordinary level. His sound on trumpet, warm and full with Clifford Brown's influence in the execution even as his harmonic conception was more modern, gave Peterson a front-line partner worthy of the encounter. Moore's tenor is steady and driving. The three of them on "There Will Never Be Another You" is a highlight: bebop in full flower, late in the century.

Munich, 1999. Peterson is 74 years old, and a series of strokes in the mid-1990s had reduced the range of his left hand's movement. The technique is not what it was. But what remains is extraordinary: the right hand still has that combination of precision and expressiveness; the harmonic knowledge is intact; the musical intelligence is actually more evident than it was when the virtuosity could be used to obscure it.

The album documents a musician making peace with limitation and finding that the limitation itself becomes expressive. The slower tempos are a choice, not a concession. The simpler left-hand parts let the right hand's melodic statements breathe more freely. Peterson had always been the most technically overwhelming jazz pianist alive; here he becomes something different and perhaps richer: a musician who has learned what to leave out.

The final studio recording, and a bookend to the Canadiana Suite of 1964: another suite inspired by Canada, another personal compositional statement. Where Canadiana was specific and local, mapping neighborhoods and geography, Trail of Dreams is more reflective, a meditation on the country that shaped him from the distance of a long career and a life fully lived in the music. Michel Legrand's string arrangements give the suite a warmth and scope that Peterson had rarely attempted since the Hot House Flowers sessions with strings in 1984.

The harmonic language has evolved in the 36 years since Canadiana Suite: more jazz-classical in its approach, more impressionist in its use of color. Wakenius's guitar adds a textural dimension that opens space for Peterson to play with less density, and the quieter movements contain some of the most beautiful piano playing he ever recorded. Trail of Dreams is a fitting conclusion to one of the most sustained musical careers in jazz history: a musician returning to his origins with everything he has learned.