silent night (r.i.p. oscar peterson)

On his 1964 Trio album We Get Requests, there is a moment -- maybe more than one -- where pianist Oscar Peterson slips into pastiche. He effortlessly resolves a pop song played as a jazz tune with a riff taken from classical music.

It's easy to hear why in a CBC interview, Peterson once described jazz as an "intellectual form". He was nothing if not an intelligent musician; but while the phrase accurately reflects his virtuoso style, it fails to do justice to his playful grace. On We Get Requests he takes tired old mules like People and Girl From Ipanema, beaten to death in a thousand divebar jazz pits, and summons their spirit from the grave to dance with unbearable lightness.

Note the significance of the album's second title word: not we play requests; we get them. And, the subtext reads, you're lucky if we take them. It's a good thing neither Peterson nor his partners Brown and Thigpen played horn; they would have had a hard time blowing with their tongues lodged so firmly in their cheeks.

Miles Davis's famous diss -- that Peterson "makes me sick because he copies everybody" -- missed the point. Peterson indeed recycled as prominently as Al Gore on a book tour: few jazz musician don't. I once played in a band where the trumpeter's favorite joke was to find a way to add the Simpsons' theme tune to every solo without the audience noticing. Peterson quoted and studied others with a flair that left no doubt the talent was entirely his own.

Ten days ago he passed away from kidney failure; an old man's death, quiet and dignified, as deaths go. His prolific career saw him accompany the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, even Billie Holliday herself. Few of his former collaborators survive to mourn him.

If you ask me, the best we can do to honour his memory is put on one of his records -- the aforementioned We Get Requests, My Favorite Instrument, or Night Train perhaps -- and laugh: remembering, in true Oscar spirit, not to take ourselves too seriously, but to finesse our way through life with redemptive good humor; and a Petersonian sprinkling of pastiche.