Celebrating catalogue of Canada’s finest jazz musician

Oscar Peterson didn’t just accompany the great vocalists of jazz and swing — Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire and Dinah Washington. He was one of the greats.

Called the “Maharaja of the keyboard” by Duke Ellington, the eight-time Grammy winner was Canada’s finest jazz musician.

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra honours the Montreal-born pianist and composer, who died in 2007 and would have turned 100 this past August, at a tribute concert on Sunday.

“It’s a Canadian première for these brand-new orchestrations of dad’s Trail of Dreams suite,” Peterson’s youngest daughter Céline Peterson says from Nova Scotia.

“(Picking this piece) was actually, admittedly, selfish on my part because I love the album. It’s one of my favourites.”

Composed in 1999, the suite is dedicated to Peterson’s native country and includes movements with names such as Lonesome Prairie and Manitoba Minuet.

Winnipeg-born Mike Downes arranges the new orchestrations, and plays bass with the Oscar Peterson Centennial Quartet, joined by the WSO under Edwin Outwater’s baton.

Juno-winning Winnipeg guitarist Jocelyn Gould also plays in the quartet, along with drummer Jim Doxas and pianist Robi Botos.

Céline says she’s particularly fond of her father’s later works, known for their harmonic depth and classical sensibilities. However, it’s his compositions and collaborations more than half a century ago for which he’s best known — his gospel-inspired Hymn to Freedom (1962), an ode to the civil rights movement; his bluesy Night Train (1963); and his interpretations of standards such as Blue Moon with Holiday and I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good).

Growing up around this legacy was something Céline says she almost took for granted as a child.

“You could not dream of an education that compares to the one that I got being on the road with him, and I took it the way any kid would take it. It was a routine for me,” she says.

For her, double bassist Ray Brown was simply “Uncle Ray” and producer/promoter Norman Granz just “Uncle Norman.”

Granz, one of jazz’s most important impresarios and a leader in desegregating American music venues, famously stumbled upon Oscar Peterson’s music in a cab on his way to the Montreal airport.

“The radio was on, and he asked what record that was, and the driver said, ‘No, actually, that’s live. It’s happening here in the city.’ And Norm said, ‘Turn this cab around and take me there,’” Céline says.

It wasn’t long before the pianist was playing Carnegie Hall and with Ella Fitzgerald.

Oscar Peterson was also close to Nat King Cole and once entered a tongue-in-cheek pact with him.

“Nat was one of dad’s primary pianistic influences, and dad was toying around with singing a little bit. One night Nat came up to him and said, ‘Listen, I’ll make you a deal. I won’t play the piano if you won’t sing anymore,’ because their voices (could have) shocking similarities,” Céline says.

Peterson’s daughter has plenty of star-studded stories, but her focus, when it comes to her father’s legacy and Canadian music in general, isn’t only on the distant past.

She teases that her father’s fabled, unreleased collection of music from the 1980s for synthesizers may hit the airwaves someday soon and Céline is especially interested in his later music.

Peterson suffered a stroke in 1993, effectively making his left hand “just for show,” as he told Céline.

This constraint on his virtuosity, while demanding he relearn the instrument in many ways, also inspired him to follow a more tender, intimate direction in his music.

“When you’re listening to the music that he wrote or any performances in that period, yes, of course, you’re more likely to hear him struggling,” she says.

It was because of this disability that Peterson reportedly turned down prime minister Jean Chrétien’s offer to make him Ontario’s lieutenant-governor.

“But I think he wrote some of his most beautiful music in those years. He actually finally admitted his favourite song of his is When Summer Comes and that was written in the in the late ’90s,” Céline says.

It’s this period to which Trail of Dreams: A Canadian Suite belongs, and one reason Céline is excited by the WSO’s centennial tribute concert (which she is unable to attend but will be MCed by her mother, Kelly Peterson).

“Mike (Downes) approaches everything with such love, care and delicacy, and his goal was always just to see how he could support the music. It’s a nice opportunity for the crowd to hear both the smaller group formation and quartet, which is a group formation that dad was very well known for. So, it’s a big show. We’ve got a lot going on,” says Céline, who’s works in the Canadian music industry as a producer and artist representative.

While her father struck a balancing act — a master of American idioms of jazz who often wrote about Canada, where he lived for much of his life — she sees many Canadian artists today struggling to assert their artistic voice in the face of American market forces.

“One thing that I want to make sure we don’t lose with jazz, or any genre of music, is authenticity,” she says. “We’ve gotten to a point where the priority is no longer the music, and the priority is, instead… how can I fit into this box so that I’m radio friendly? Or so that I can up my stream, so that I can make an extra four cents?”

While she’s optimistic about Canadian music, jazz and otherwise, she believes more government support is necessary to encourage artistic freedom and authenticity.

“We have such an incredible talent pool in this country that we need to do a better job of supporting them and cherishing them,” she says.

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