#Bill evans transcriptions driver#
#Bill evans transcriptions professional#

Two years later they added guitarist Barney Kessel. In 1950, Peterson worked in a duo with double bassist Ray Brown. In the documentary video Music in the Key of Oscar, Peterson tells how Granz stood up to a gun-toting Southern policeman who wanted to stop the trio from using 'whites-only' taxis. This was more than a managerial relationship Peterson praised Granz for standing up for him and other black jazz musicians in the segregationist south US of the 1950s and 1960s. He remained Peterson's manager for most of his career. In 1949 he introduced Peterson in New York City at a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall. Granz had seen Peterson before this but was underwhelmed.

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He was so impressed that he told the driver to take him to the club so he could meet the pianist. Oscar Peterson as a 20 year old, at the Hamilton Infirmary in 1945 Duos, trios, and quartets Īccording to an interview with Granz in the 2021 documentary Oscar Peterson: Black + White, in a cab on the way to the Montreal airport, Norman Granz heard a radio program broadcasting from a local club. By the time he was in his 20s, he had developed a reputation as a technically brilliant and melodically inventive pianist.

He gravitated toward boogie-woogie and swing with a particular fondness for Nat King Cole and Teddy Wilson. From 1945 to 1949 he worked in a trio and recorded for Victor Records. In his teens he was a member of the Johnny Holmes Orchestra.

#Bill evans transcriptions professional#

He became a professional pianist, starring in a weekly radio show and playing at hotels and music halls. After that victory, he dropped out of the High School of Montreal, where he played in a band with Maynard Ferguson. In 1940, at fourteen years of age, he won the national music competition organized by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Only in his later years did he decrease his practice to one or two hours daily. For many years his piano studies included four to six hours of daily practice. Īt the age of nine, Peterson played piano with a degree of control that impressed professional musicians. He was called 'the Brown Bomber of the Boogie-Woogie'. But he was captivated by traditional jazz and boogie-woogie and learned several ragtime pieces. Peterson was persistent at practising scales and classical études.Īs a child, Peterson studied with Hungarian-born pianist Paul de Marky, a student of István Thomán, who was himself a pupil of Franz Liszt, so his early training was predominantly based on classical piano. His father, Daniel Peterson, an amateur trumpeter and pianist, was one of his first music teachers, and his sister Daisy taught him classical piano.

At the age of five, Peterson began honing his skills on trumpet and piano, but a bout of tuberculosis when he was seven prevented him from playing the trumpet again, so he directed all his attention to the piano.

It was in this predominantly black neighbourhood that he encountered the jazz culture. Peterson grew up in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy in Montreal. Kitts and the British Virgin Islands) his father worked as a porter for Canadian Pacific Railway. Peterson was born in Montreal, Quebec, to immigrants from the West Indies (St.