Oscar Peterson on the Dick Cavett Show (1979)

[Music] do [Music] my so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] say a person does get spoiled by hearing the best that's i have a feeling that art tatum might have liked the way you played that uh would that be at least an educated comment um well i would hope so what was that note was it you mean if you hit it on the piano it would prove it no you passed it close to a little touch of feedback there uh oscar that's really terrific to have here um explain to people who may not be uh as uh illustriously educated and jazz as i am or the person who made my notes for me uh what it means to say that there's a tatum overtone to where the way you played that or well our tatum i think as we both know was and still is in my view anyway the best jazz pianist around yeah his uh sensitive relationship with the instrument his command of the instrument which is the thing that intrigues me least believe it or not and i'm sure intrigued a lot of other players least some it did had a bearing on a lot of people because you know when someone when people hear someone run up and down the keyboard they immediately go like you know whether it be horowitz or our tatum however his harmonic sense and his rhythmic sense were the things that intrigued me and he was just a total virtue also at the instrument what's your formal musical education uh a classical background yeah uh originally it started on the trumpet well i started on trump yeah i had a lung ailment and had to give that up at six or seven years tb was it yes yeah and in those days it wasn't as easily handled then as it is now yeah and you you simply couldn't physically play the trumpet with at that point well the doctors didn't think it was a good idea um it had the whole family had suffered from it and uh because it was a lung ailment they thought it was wise enough to pursue wind instruments so i reverted i had started on piano yeah do you believe in a destiny of some sort i mean would you had you not had the problem uh continuing on the trump or do you think you were destined for the piano in some way at that age yeah at that age i thought i was destined to play baseball you know and that's all i was thinking about in the football but nevertheless i did have a love for music you weren't one of those kids who was forced to come in from the baseball field and practice scales were you i'd admit that yes i was were you really how many innings did they let you play um so your own musical background includes trumpet which can you still play it now it could be can still think of the trumpet yeah i can't really play because i don't have the chops for it as they say i wonder if doctors would still agree that it would be unwise for you to play no i mean okay almost every kid is attracted to the trump at first for some reason it's the jazzy if it isn't the drums well i think today it's a guitar oh well yeah but uh trumpet is you know any instrument to a youngster is is a is a thing of mystery you know you see whether it be a shining trumpet or a brand new guitar or i think the least intriguing instrument sometimes because it's usually or was usually in the home was a piano mm-hmm it's just sort of a piece of furniture yeah it became part of the part of the background and so kids lived and they were used to but if you brought a trumpet in the house you immediately got everyone's attention yeah did harry james mean anything to you not in those years and that's good you said you said some very interesting things in interviews i've read and downbeat in other places uh uh you said a lot of jazz criticism is is um uneducated and fraudulent i think may have been i don't know those are your words i can't remember if i use that word but it's a very good word in that yeah well i think so i think because uh it's you know it gets back to the the old armchair quarterback syndrome okay it's all very well to sit up and i know people that today never want jazz they go to classical concerts and they hurt they'll hear someone like horowitz or richter or come back and say uh i don't think he did the list thing very well now that's a great comment considering they don't even play piano yeah you know i i've always recognized a bad egg without being able to lay one well not necessarily as many people as i know that are tone deaf you know i know a lot of people that couldn't carry a tune if you put into the lease for them okay so consequently if they sit up and say uh the third movement of some such thing was badly handled i i have to question what they're basing this on yeah and it seems like they owe it to the musician to explain just how it was badly handled rather than just well i don't know where they owed to them dick but i really think that you know when you stop the figure the preparation that goes that most musicians go through in either medium jazz or classical uh i know what i have gone through to prepare for whatever i do today uh it's a very serious thing with me believe it or not and uh even when i had trios i was known as a taskmaster for that reason i think you owe your ev every bit of input you can get yeah you owe it to your listening public regard regardless whether it's one person your own mother sitting in the living room or thousands so i could wave my hands and magically make you a jazz critic and you hear a guy sit at the piano there and play what would be your criteria for judging somebody else if i would a player myself if you were a critic i mean if you wanted to write a non-playing critic yeah let's say i'd have to go the emotional way that would be the only way i know how to go i'd have to say i would have to assume that i am involved in listening to various players and in jazz and i'd have to say to myself first of all did this performance move me did it reach me and if it did then i would start looking at why uh did it reach me if i had uh sympatico with the harmonic progre progressions that he used or the the uh connecting runs or the the general overall feeling with which he he or she played the piece yeah can a jazz critic hurt you any in the way that a theater critic can close a play oh i don't think so i mean there's nothing new to you i don't well i i must say this i i won't call any names but i know of one particular talent that i think was a pretty big talent that was i think don't think was in any was aided by some very severe and undue criticism and i think it had a bearing uh mentally on the person yeah should just not read them well i like to read what what's the what's tougher concert or club to me uh a concert is tougher then yeah are there clubs left you keep hearing that the clubs are vanishing but yet they're there yeah they're the club's there uh concert i say it's tougher because you you know you get one shot it's like a championship fight yeah and there was a very astute critic in germany once it he made a very i thought a very bright uh he took a very bright view to this thing about reviewing concerts and he said you know when an artist arrives in town for that one shot everybody has been prepared mentally and you know psyched up by the recordings that are made under the very best circumstances and they're expecting a level yeah to come up to that meanwhile you've flown in you you've they've lost all your clothes as they did yesterday for me or uh the hotel isn't ready or something on your meals are bad or whatever it is and you come to the hall and the maybe the sound isn't right you have one shot to make it happen whereas in a club you have first of all if you have one or two or three shows you have time for adjustment for any of these things and the club is a different feeling as you can imagine yeah the the airline lost your clothes that's that's normal the airlines oh yeah they usually where did all those clothes go i don't know but i spent a weekend in london some time ago trying to find playing concerts over the weekend which airline was it uh it was i think it was uh better now no because they should never lose your clothes and if they do then you should be able to mention them on television so if you want to mention them no i would give that to them that's not going to change their ways anyway you credit johnny holmes with being a great influence on your technique i guess and so on uh can you stand the fact that his name doesn't ring a bell with me no you can't no i i can stand the fact that i no you shouldn't necessarily know because johnny holmes is the name that would come up and it would mean something to people in montreal that were familiar with in my early days yeah he was a band leader that i worked with was he black or white no who's white don't mind my ass he's white and he was uh he led a band in the west end of montreal and uh i joined the band at one point and he became uh sort of a an overseer a loving overseer of mine and he talked you know i do things and you say no i don't think you ought to do that that way because i was really in the formative years and you know you're sort of jazz doesn't have didn't have then and still doesn't have the exact uh scholastic uh material available to someone that wants to play jazz and didn't have that then as i said and he'd say no i don't think she'd do that like that you know that doesn't it doesn't ring true or doesn't fit he criticized and you know praise if it was needed after you play again now uh i'd like to do that thing that i like to do when we get a great artist on the show which is to have you break down and explain to me a few things that are phrases that we've read and heard and so on but don't really know what they mean and you could illustrate them for us and show us in this one and we get a master class here at very very reasonable rates oscar would you step to the bosendorfer one more time for us and we'll do that after that all right [Applause] stretch the prison door for here well i thank you and his grace the duke thank you and uh oscar let's hurry because i've got some notes here for my scrapbook i wouldn't be possible to pick up pick a tune and have you show us just uh superficially perhaps are you going to pick a tune i know i'll let you pick the giant no no go ahead because i might pick buttons and bows or who knows um and you could show us some of this what i think are called stylistic trademarks of other other pianists what do we mean by the phrase the stride piano of our tatum piano of tatum or people of that area is the ability to play the background for yourself and make it work like a rhythm section as opposed to when you play with the rhythm section where you would just hold a chord usually or punctuate with a chord and play because the drummer is playing the bass player is playing so the right hand is really the instrument and the left hand is putting the rhythm section out of work that's right that's the idea okay what else did i put down here oh yeah here's something i wrote um talking about influences on you and the quote the two-fingered percussiveness of net coal could you show the two fingerprints do this sort which each note has its own articulation rather than being an insipid phrase like [Music] it's and he used mostly the front end of his hand and in fact it was very important it was articulated like you do in speech then on the music running that's part of the sentence the other part we they could hear in your early influence was the lyric octave work of earl garner oh they're talking about the full chords like this where errol used a handful of chords to play melody if he was going to play uh getting sentimental he might play like this and delay it like that and as i said on another show you have to know how to be able to do the proper delay so it doesn't sound false since you didn't name the airline you better not name the other show i won't was it uh run by a middle-aged man with white hair no no okay what about the relaxed block chords or would that be a typo for black chords no i guess not in george hearings george sharon used this kind of thing to run melodies left roses of picketing where he used the fullness of a sac section almost instead of playing play it again with partial chord partial chord would be two notes for instance it's much sparse much more sparse this is full you know it just occurred to me that uh i i read so that you had given up singing because you sounded a little too much like a well-known singer don't say who it is um let's see could you do a little bit of a blossom fill and see if anybody can tell what you sound like i wish i could or what's something give me a kiss to build a dream on do you really sound like him well it's debatable you won't do it i don't want to embarrass you you don't embarrass me i i sing occasionally when i you know when i feel he did feel up to it could you sing just a bit and see if you sound like anybody i'll be there this is what a rare mood i'm in well it's almost like being loved and if you say donna summers you're in deep trouble and so are you no i think everyone i think everyone recognized the voice of the immortal george burns let's not explain it what are double-handed or is it double octave bass lines i think there was one actually which means double act octave uh melody lines rather than bass lines because if you play a linear invention if you play uh as a game on uh sweet charger if you invent something as an alternative line yeah then you play the same thing with two hands are they doing the identical thing those two hands you get into two different places in the piano it gives a little different substance this is a little difficult to do if you haven't been doing it was that ever hard for you or when you were the first time you tried that could you do it no i couldn't do it the first time i tried it okay uh what would i be hearing if the if the pianist was tonality based i've seen that term oh you'd be hearing all right if you take the same tune roses okay right you'd hear this sort of thing you might hear a more involved harmony like whatever they chose to do you're just moving the harmonies around and changing to give it to a different shape to the tune thank you for this master lesson quickly two ten-second questions how good a trumpet player was louis armstrong in terms of musicians terms fantastic yeah and the other one is how long has wigs been a verb transitive as in cigarette holder that wigs me in the lyrics to the satin but you don't need to answer questions oscar peterson it's a genuine thrill to have you here and if you would play us off it would be uh wonderful just a little cocktail piano thank you [Applause] [Music] so you

Channel: Meridian3301

Views: 10,822

Rating: 4.9793816 out of 5

Keywords: oscar peterson, dick cavett, jazz, interview, new york, piano, 70s, cool, talk show, musician, george shearing, miles davis, nat king cole

Id: -30OfVjHw98

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020