A Jazz Odyssey CD cover. Morning Edition , February 21, 2003 - As a youngster, Oscar Peterson remembers sneaking downstairs while his parents slept to listen to the radio. “[I] put my ear right to the speaker and listen to Duke (Ellington) and (Count) Basie and Artie Shaw,” the legendary jazz pianist tells NPR’s Bob Edwards in a Morning Edition interview. “The volume would be way, way down low so I wouldn’t wake my parents…

and I’d be ingesting all this wonderful music.” Peterson says he studied those artists and even played along with their records “so that when I had to play with them in person, I sort of had a bit of a jump on their musical personality.” Peterson, 77, has lived a musician’s dream for more than half a century. He’s received dozens of awards including seven Grammys and several organizations have recognized him with lifetime achievement awards.

He’s made so many records, either as a leader or a sideman, that he’s lost count. As Edwards reports, Peterson studied classical piano while growing up in Montreal, but was seduced by jazz. After performing with the Jazz at the Philharmonic concert series in the United States, he found himself accompanying many of the artists he first heard as a kid, including Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young and Dizzy Gillespie.

Peterson was heavily influenced by Art Tatum, whose style combined technical virtuosity with a driving rhythm and nonstop melodic improvisations. Peterson’s father, Daniel, introduced his precocious son to a Tatum recording. “I remember saying, ‘Hey, that’s wild. Who are those guys?’” Peterson says. His father replied that it was one man producing all those sounds. “I didn’t believe him for a while,” Peterson says.