CANADA:Oscar Peterson, whose technical virtuosity, imaginative improvising and ineffable sense of swing made him one of the jazz world's most influential and honoured pianists, died on Sunday. He was 82.
In failing health in recent months, Peterson died from kidney failure at home in Mississauga, Ontario, the Canadian Broadcasting Company said.
Since he began his 60-year career with a Carnegie Hall concert in 1949, Peterson was universally admired. Among his most significant awards were eight Grammys, as well as a Recording Academy lifetime achievement honour in 1997. His home country, where he continued to live for most of his life, made him a Companion of the Order of Canada, its highest civilian honour, and he was the first living Canadian to be depicted on a postage stamp.
"I consider him to be the dominant piano player that established my foundation," pianist Herbie Hancock said. "I had started off as a classical pianist, and I was dazzled by the precision of his playing. But it was primarily the groove that moved me about Oscar. The groove and the blues, but with the sophistication that I was used to from classical music." Singer and pianist Diana Krall, like Peterson a Canadian, was similarly influenced, generations later, by Peterson.
"He was the reason I became a jazz pianist," she said. "In my high school yearbook, it says that my goal is to become a jazz pianist like Oscar Peterson. I didn't know then we'd become such close friends over the years. We were together at his house in October, playing and singing songs together. Now it's almost impossible for me to think of him in the past tense."
Peterson's mastery gave him a unique status, one that hadn't been seen since the pre-second World War virtuosity of Art Tatum. Performing with some of jazz's iconic figures (Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald) he revealed an astonishing virtuosity. -