'Oscar Peterson: Black+ White' review: Celebrating a legendary jazz pianist

WHAT IT’S ABOUT The best word to describe the Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson is "prodigious" — and even that might be an understatement. Over a 60-year career, he played thousands of concerts, released more than 200 albums and earned eight Grammys. DownBeat magazine named him pianist of the year, 13 years in a row. His original composition "Hymn to Freedom," released in 1963, became a Civil Rights anthem and helped inaugurate Barack Obama in 2009. Peterson missed that historic moment, but by the time of his death, in 2007, he was considered by many to be the finest jazz pianist the world had ever seen.

For all that, Peterson isn’t exactly a household name in America — at least, not on the level of such contemporaries as Miles Davis, John Coltrane or Dizzy Gillespie. Ask the nearest jazz connoisseur about Peterson and you’ll likely get a rapturous soliloquy, but the casual listener may have less to say. A new documentary, "Oscar Peterson: Black + White," hopes to change that. Directed by Barry Avrich ("David Foster: Off the Record"), this 82-minute movie provides a brief overview of the jazz icon’s life and work.

MY SAY If you’re the kind of music fan who loves to argue about who was the greatest, the most important, the most influential, then "Oscar Peterson: Black + White" is for you. This movie has one goal: To put Peterson at the top of your list.

To that end, it marshals an army of musicians, experts and admirers who praise Peterson’s virtuosity. Old hands such as Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock weigh in, as do young guns like Jon Batiste and Robi Botos (a Peterson protégé). From the rock world comes an excitable Billy Joel, who recalls listening to Peterson’s records late at night until his mom would yell at him to turn them off. "What he just threw away for five seconds," Joel says of Peterson, "I would cut off my right arm to be able to do."

Born in Montreal in 1925, Peterson learned piano from his father, a railway porter, and his sister before taking lessons from the Hungarian-born Paul de Marky (himself a student of István Thomán, who studied under Franz Liszt, which may explain Peterson’s classical-caliber precision). By his early 20s, Peterson had become a staple of Canada’s jazz scene. How good was he? The music impresario Norman Granz, riding in a Montreal taxi, heard him playing live on the radio and demanded to be driven to the nightclub. Granz ended up booking Peterson’s first U.S. concert — at Carnegie Hall.

If you’re waiting for this success story to go dark (drugs, alcohol, etc.), it never does. Peterson was an untortured artist, with few demons save for his weight (which reportedly reached 275 pounds) and regrets over his three failed marriages. (Kelly Peterson, his fourth wife and widow, is a consulting producer here.) Even a 1993 stroke that hampered Peterson's left arm couldn't keep him down; he continued to play. The critical consensus: Peterson with one arm was still better than most pianists with two. (A 1998 concert review from Variety marveled at his band's "bullet train of notes.")

The downside of all this upside: "Oscar Peterson: Black + White" doesn’t tell the most dramatic story, and its endless superlatives grow repetitive. At the same time, the movie serves a noble purpose: To point listeners to Peterson’s rich catalog of beautiful, buoyant, warmhearted music. By the way, he was a pretty good singer, too.

BOTTOM LINE A short and sweet refresher course on a jazz giant.