Oscar Peterson
Nobody played the piano like Oscar Peterson. The technique was Tatum-descended and nearly impossible. The touch was orchestral. The swing was absolute. Across five decades and six labels, Peterson recorded what may be the deepest piano discography in jazz: the early Verve trios with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis, the Classic Trio with Ed Thigpen that produced Night Train and We Get Requests, the MPS years in a private studio in the Black Forest, and the long Pablo afterlife with Norman Granz. Fifty-one albums across four eras. Browse below.
Browse by Era
Each era page covers a distinct period in Peterson's career, with full reviews, personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, and album art for every record.
From the 1950 Carnegie Hall debut with Jazz at the Philharmonic through the Verve songbook trilogy with Herb Ellis. Ray Brown is already in the bass chair for most of these. Twelve records establishing the vocabulary that the rest of the career refined.
Ray Brown on bass, Ed Thigpen on drums. The unit most listeners think of when they think Oscar Peterson. Night Train, We Get Requests, The Trio Plays, Canadiana Suite. The chemistry has never been replicated.
Eleven albums recorded mostly at Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer's private studio in the Black Forest village of Villingen. Intimate sound, looser song selections, new trio configurations, Latin material. The MPS catalog has been repeatedly reissued by audiophile labels.
Nineteen records across the final three decades. Norman Granz brought Peterson to Pablo in 1973 and they produced the duo sessions, the Trumpet Kings summits, the Montreux records, and Nigerian Marketplace. The Telarc years and post-1993-stroke recordings close the catalog.
Ten Oscar Peterson records embedded as full-album videos: Night Train, We Get Requests, The Trio, The Sound of the Trio, Very Tall, My Favorite Instrument, West Side Story, Affinity, Eloquence, and The Oscar Peterson Trio Plays.
Open the Oscar Peterson video page →Oscar Peterson, 1925–2007
Oscar Emmanuel Peterson was born in Montreal, Quebec, on August 15, 1925, the fourth of five children of a railway porter who was also an amateur musician. He started on trumpet but a childhood case of tuberculosis cost him most of his right lung capacity and he switched to piano at six. By his early teens he was studying with the Hungarian classical pianist Paul de Marky, who gave him the foundation in technique that would define his entire career.
At fourteen Peterson joined the Johnny Holmes Orchestra in Montreal as the band's only Black member. By his late teens he was leading his own trio at the Alberta Lounge and recording for the RCA Victor Canadian label. In 1949 the impresario Norman Granz heard him in a Montreal taxi (the radio was on; Granz had the driver pull over) and made him the central figure of his Jazz at the Philharmonic touring concerts, debuting Peterson at Carnegie Hall in September of that year. The Granz-Peterson partnership would last for the rest of Peterson's life and would produce the Verve, Pablo, and Telarc catalogs.
The Classic Trio of Peterson, Ray Brown, and Ed Thigpen recorded between 1961 and 1964, producing Night Train, We Get Requests, and the Canadiana Suite among others. After Thigpen left in 1965, the MPS years in Villingen, Germany followed, with Sam Jones or Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass and various drummers. The Pablo period from 1973 onward produced duo records, summit meetings with the Trumpet Kings, and the late masterwork Nigerian Marketplace from 1981.
A serious stroke in 1993 cost Peterson much of the left-hand mobility that had been central to his style, but he kept recording for another decade with adapted technique. He received the Order of Canada, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and honorary doctorates from a dozen universities. He died December 23, 2007, in Mississauga, Ontario, at age eighty-two.