Oscar Peterson on Film: Encore, Please

About 30 minutes into the new documentary about jazz great Oscar Peterson that’s streaming on Hulu, there’s archival footage of a televised conversation between Peterson and Andre Previn in which the two late piano masters discuss their mutual admiration for the great Nat King Cole. They agree that a major attribute of Cole’s piano work was that, as Previn says, “he knew not only what to play, but what to leave out.”While Peterson consistently said Cole and Art Tatum were the biggest influences on his own playing, if there ever was a giant of jazz whose genius was predicated on not leaving anything out, it was Oscar Peterson. Indeed, he did everything at the same time: exalt the melody, plumb the depths of the chord changes, swing like crazy with intellectual acumen as well as sheer emotion; he was a monster soloist who also excelled at interacting with others. If “Oscar Peterson: Black + White” has a flaw, it may be that it tries to do too many things at once. Yet that somehow suits the subject matter. The new film, which like the keyboard giant himself comes from Canada, is foremost a documentary profile of a great artist and, as such, follows the general chronological and biographical format of such projects. But it’s also a filmed record of a Peterson memorial concert — he died in 2007 at age 82 — featuring a half dozen or so mostly younger Canadian pianists. The onscreen commentators fluctuate between older American living legends like Herbie Hancock, Ramsey Lewis, and Quincy Jones, and young Canadian players. The primary Americans under 60 on camera are the Jon Batiste of “Late Show” fame and the New York Times’s Giovanni Russonello, both welcome presences.The general pace of the movie is exceedingly uptempo; like most documentary filmmaking in the digital era, the incessant cross-cutting is almost schizophrenically frenetic. We watch and hear historical footage of Peterson in concert, playing a few bars of a fast blues, even as the soundtrack is overlaid with the voice of a talking head, and even as vintage imagery parades by: photos, posters, advertisements, and notices from old newspapers. Yet the tempo is appropriate to Peterson’s own relentlessly fast playing — in a way that it wouldn’t be with a more lyrical player, say Bill Evans, or one who never made a virtue of speed, say Thelonious Monk.The director seems unwilling to let us hear Oscar play, other than in the briefest of excerpts. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the music itself, but rather he seems to have no faith in millennials’ attention spans. He also doesn’t trust that most of his viewers will have even heard of Oscar Peterson — which is a logical starting point, to take nothing for granted. To this end, the participation of singer-songwriter-pianist Billy Joel is especially valuable: Hopefully millennials will have heard of the rock-’n’-roll icon, at least. Despite some missteps — we didn’t really need a detour into the Black Lives Matter movement — the film captures the jubilant spirit and exciting flavor of its subject, and will inspire viewers, both newbies and veteran Petersonians, to want to hear more. That’s what documentaries like this are supposed to do. Yet the filmmaker is sufficiently self-aware to realize that profiles such as this can and should never be the whole story. Ideally, when “Oscar Peterson: Black + White” is hopefully released on DVD, it will include at least 60 or so minutes of uninterrupted bonus performances of the great man in concert. Failing that, much great footage is readily viewable on YouTube, where the music can speak for itself.

Oscar Peterson on Film: Encore, Please

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