Swing, with Harmonics

At the age of 28, a Montreal Negro named Oscar Peterson is one of the world's finest jazz pianists. As a touring star of the troupe called Jazz at the Philharmonic (TIME, March 2), he has fascinated audiences on three continents, won Down Beat magazine's "best piano player" poll four years in a row. Last week, at Los Angeles' Tiffany Club," he settled his huge (6 ft. 2 in., 250 Ibs.) bulk on the bench, spread his long, spatulate fingers over the keys, and gave his doting audience a typical sample of piano a la Peterson.

Each tune, e.g., The Surrey with the Fringe on Top, began with a fast, straightforward version of the melody, then, after a few' bars, swung into Peterson's impromptu variations -- interlaced arabesques, rhythmical counterpoints, stream-of-consciousness insertions from other tunes--then back to the original melody. Throughout, Pianist Peterson accompanied himself with his own scat-singing, in the pauses mopped his sweating brow with his handkerchief. Throughout, for all his jet-propelled tempos, his fingers frisked the keys with the precision of a hell-bent Horowitz.

Tatum for Fancies. Such mastery of the keyboard did not come easily to Oscar Peterson. His father, a music-loving porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway, sat him on a piano stool when he was five and told him to start practicing. From then on, whenever Papa Peterson left on his railroad trips, he laid out practice schedules. If the practicing was not done on his return, Oscar "caught hell." Oscar began to get professional engagements in his mid-teens, but his father never let applause and paychecks go to his son's head: "You're not going to take money for that, are you?" he would snort, whenever Oscar showed signs of undue pride.

Peterson found his own style only after studying others'. His first hero was Teddy Powell. Then he focused on Nat "King" Cole. Eventually, in 1939, he heard Art Tatum, the man Oscar calls "the greatest living instrumentalist of them all." Tatum's flying keyboard fancies knocked the budding Peterson completely off balance: "I couldn't play a note after hearing Art that first time. I gave up the piano for three weeks."

Chopin for Reach. Now thoroughly recovered from his temporary paralysis, he has gone a long way toward outdoing Tatum. One of his particular fancies is to blend in phrases from a completely different piece--such as snatches of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata in the middle of My Funny Valentine. "I like to venture out," he says. "Like with Funny Valentine, it came to me that there was a similarity between those chords and Beethoven's. I ventured out. It worked.

"Don't get me wrong. Experimentation can go too far. But with all the experimenting that's going on these days, it seems to me musicians are beginning to go back to one basic thing: it's got to swing. Of course it isn't the same swing, because it has progressed; it's swing with finer harmonics."

After he swings out of the Tiffany this week, Oscar will return to his family in Montreal. There he will spend four to seven hours a day practicing the classics. Why the classics? "I play Chopin because he gives you the reach. Scarlatti gives you the close fingering. Ravel and Debussy help you on those pretty, lush harmonics. Bach gives you the counterpoint."

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