NMC to celebrate 100th anniversary of Oscar Peterson’s birth with exhibit, concerts
When Andy Milne was a student studying jazz at York University, one of his teachers offered some seemingly obvious advice: “Learn the song.”
It was in the mid-1980s, and Milne, who would go on to be a versatile and Juno-winning composer and jazz pianist, at first thought this guidance was a little flippant. But it was coming from the great Oscar Peterson, who would routinely toss out these sorts of pearls and spark some deep thinking in Milne about what he meant. Eventually, he realized Peterson was not being flippant or obvious.
“It was weeks later when it hit me what he meant,” says Milne, in an interview with Postmedia from his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. “It was much richer than that. I just found it fascinating, and, as a teacher myself now, I think back to him saying it literally and matter-of-fact and giving you the assignment to go figure out what he meant. Learn the song could mean ‘Oh, I don’t know the song very well. I guess if I just learn the song a little better, I’ll sound good.’ That’s not what he meant. In terms of a 360-degree relationship with a piece of music, it’s much more of an investigation around it and thinking more richly about the relationship.”
“That one really stuck with me,” he adds. “Because I didn’t even get it when he said it. I was like ‘Oh, that can’t be the answer.’”
Aug. 15 marks the 100th anniversary of Peterson’s birth in Montreal and is also the date when Milne will perform Andy Milne: In Tribute to Oscar Peterson 100 at the National Music Centre. It coincides with the centre’s newly opened exhibit, Timeless: 100 Years of Oscar Peterson, which features a wide variety of artifacts, awards, testimonials and instruments from the pianist’s illustrious career.
Milne will play some of Peterson’s compositions and talk about the legend’s influence on him. As a Canadian jazz pianist and composer — not to mention someone with a personal connection to the man — it may seem that Peterson’s influence is a given. But Milne says he hopes to “highlight maybe the more unusual ways that central cultural and artistic figures” influence people and communities.
“I’m going to pay homage to him by talking about him and talking about his influence and playing pieces that he composed that I played in my formative years,” he says. “At this point, they mean something different to me now than they did when I was a young kid. My approach is different, and the sound I’m going to be going for is different because I’m not an artist where someone would say ‘Yeah, you really sound like you’re influenced by Oscar Peterson” — that low-hanging fruit that someone might associate with me, even though he is a huge influence. It’s important to talk and share what influence means and how we can be distracted by more obvious ways of looking for that and validating that kind of weight in a cultural space.”
Milne was raised in the small town of Kincardine before heading to Toronto to further his music education. His introduction to Peterson’s work came when he was seven or eight and had just started playing piano. His brother-in-law gave him two of Peterson’s records, including the 1962 Oscar Peterson Trio classic Night Train and 1964’s Oscar Peterson Trio with Clark Terry. A few years later, he saw him in concert in Toronto.
“For Oscar, there was this mythology around him,” Milne says. “It just sort of struck me as a young black kid growing up in Canada: This man is a national treasure. You kind of recognize that. It was like ‘I don’t know what it means to be a musician, but I see him doing something that I think I want to do.’ That was enough to pull me in.”
Eventually, Milne convinced his classically minded piano teacher to incorporate some of Peterson’s songbook into the lessons. He was in Toronto when he first began hearing rumours that Peterson was going to be teaching at York University, which helped the young pianist make up his mind to attend.
He doesn’t remember if it was during his first or second year that he finally met the man, who came in as a coach two or three times a semester, during Milne’s small-ensemble studies at York University.
“It was just this jaw-dropping experience,” he says. “You hear he is in the building, that he’s coming. There is no escaping this. It was bittersweet. Because you are so in awe and excited, but you’re also nervous as hell.”
Still, as a teacher, Peterson was anything but a severe taskmaster.
“The thing I carried away from all those interactions was just being in close proximity to his humanity and his understanding,” Milne says. “He was a gentle guy. He wasn’t putting some sort of fear of God in the students to threaten your enthusiasm with tough love. It was almost zen-like in a certain way. That’s how I interpreted things. He’d give me nuggets and I’d go away and think for weeks and months about them because they seemed so simple at the time.”
The tagline for the National Music Centre exhibit describes Peterson as “Virtuoso. Composer. Humanitarian,” illustrating a broader reach than simply covering his towering career as an influential figure in jazz. Working with the Peterson estate and his widow, Kelly, Timeless includes archival interviews and performances, awards, family photos and immersive multimedia installations. Born in 1925 in Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighbourhood, the “The Maharaja of the Keyboard” became globally revered as not only a composer and pianist, but also an advocate of civil rights. Timeless includes the story behind 1962’s Hymn to Freedom, which became an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement. In 1978, Peterson was the first inductee into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, which is now permanently housed at the National Music Centre. He died in 2007.
Part of the exhibit is dedicated to instruments Peterson collected as an early adopter of electronic music and keyboards, at least in the studio. He generally stuck to the acoustic piano for his live performances and recordings, says Claire Neily, senior manager of collections and exhibitions. Timeless will feature the Roland D-50 synthesizer that Peterson played in Calgary at a gala during the 1988 Winter Olympics. It is believed to be the only time Peterson played a synthesizer in concert.
“Many people are enamoured with his music and his virtuosity, but knowing these other aspects of him — his electronic-instrument interest, his connection to the Civil Rights Movement in writing Hymn to Freedom and looking at all the recognition he received worldwide — people seem to celebrate him for all of these aspects, not just music. What a wonderful human he was, the musician he was and innovator,” says Neily.
Timeless: 100 years of Oscar Peterson will be at the National Music Centre until July 2026. Andy Milne will perform Aug. 15 at 7:30 p.m. On Aug. 16, the centre will present The Music of Oscar Peterson Live with Sheldon Zandboer at noon. Milne will give a talk on Aug .16 at 1 p.m. titled Oscar Peterson 100: Recognizing and Rethinking Influence.