Obituaries

The virtuoso jazz pianist whose fingers flew like birds

Oscar Peterson, uniquely among great jazz pianists, was a master of many forms. As a soloist, he was so sweeping, fast, and complex that many likened him to the 19th-century genius Franz Liszt. He was also a superb accompanist, playing alongside such giants as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzy Gillespie. And he thrived in piano-bass-guitar trios, in which his ferocious rhythm and drive literally made drums unnecessary. “Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I’ve ever heard,” said Count Basie. Benny Green declared, “Oscar can do more with one hand than many pianists can do with two.” Peterson died of kidney failure at 82.

Peterson was a gifted musician as a child, and his family pushed him to the limit, said the Chicago Tribune. “Born into a poor, working-class family in Montreal, Peterson wore patched-up pants to school and suffered beatings from his father, a railroad porter, who applied a belt when the young pianist had not mastered his lessons.” At 14, he heard a recording of “Tiger Rag” by legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum. Fearing he could never be as good, “I gave up the piano for two solid months,” he once recalled, “and I had crying fits at night.” But that same year, he won an amateur competition that launched his career. Billed in Canada as the “Brown Bomber of Boogie-Woogie”—a reference to boxer Joe Louis and Peterson’s 6-foot-3, 250-pound frame—he became the only black member of the Johnny Holmes Orchestra, which widely toured North America. Often confronting racial discrimination on the road, he made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1949.

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Peterson not only had perfect pitch, lightning speed, and incredible dexterity, said the Los Angeles Times. He also rethought how to play the piano. “Although his left hand was primarily used for accents and single notes, his right hand, sometimes playing simultaneous melodies and counterlines, more than filled the gap.” His technique was so precise, in fact, that some critics complained that he lacked heart or soul. One French critic said Peterson played “music for Pavlov’s dogs.” But Peterson forged an enduring professional association with impresario Norman Granz, who for more than 30 years organized the Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, “resulting in countless performances around the globe and dozens of albums.” His best-known work may have been with guitarist Herb Ellis and bassist Ray Brown. “Peterson’s virtuosity, Ellis’ blues-drenched phrasing, and Brown’s rock-steady rhythms” combined to make them one of the most popular and respected jazz trios of the day.

Peterson had lifelong bouts with arthritis, said Variety, and a stroke in 1993 deprived him of much of his “agility, speed, and ornate touches.” But he never stopped working. As the years went by, he “received a staggering number of awards and honors,” including eight regular Grammys, a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, and 16 honorary degrees. “From 1950–72 he won the Down Beat magazine readers’ poll for best jazz pianist more than a dozen times.” In 2005, he became the first living person, other than a reigning monarch, to be depicted on a Canadian postage stamp. Married four times, Peterson is survived by his fourth wife and seven children.

The British novelist who created a comic military antihero

Like thousands of other English boys, George MacDonald Fraser grew up reading Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes’ classic 1857 novel about public-school life. Fraser’s favorite character was the loathsome school bully, Harry Flashman. More than 30 years later, Fraser would reimagine a grown-up Flashman as a roguish, bragging, libido-driven British army swashbuckler, casting him in a series of rollicking historical novels that were popular on both sides of the Atlantic.

The son of a doctor, Fraser was a poor student, said the London Independent. At 18, he enlisted in the British army and was sent to India during World War II, where he took part in the Burma campaign. Promoted to lance corporal four times, he was repeatedly demoted for “minor infringements of army routine,” among them losing a tea urn. Fraser’s combat exploits “included being held upside down by his heels while strafed by Japanese sniper fire, as he foraged for water.” After the war, he spent 20 years as a journalist, but after being passed over as editor of the Glasgow Herald, he told his wife, Kathy, that he would “write us out of this.”

The result, said The Washington Post, was Flashman, published in 1969. Ostensibly a memoir of the Anglo-Afghan war of 1839–1842, the novel starred Brig. Gen. Sir Harry Paget Flashman, a “coward, Lothario, and soldier of misfortune” who, as his author put it, “can only display the courage of a cornered rat” as he tries to escape his picaresque predicaments. Fraser ultimately wrote 11 more Flashman adventures, in which Sir Harry “demonstrates little more than craven self-interest, yet invariably emerges as the antihero of his comic escapades, undeservedly winning top medals for bravery and bedding countless women along the way.”

“Readers adored him,” said The New York Times. Flashman could be found wherever the sun was never setting on the British Empire—at China’s Boxer Rebellion, the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the Indian Mutiny of 1857, among other exotic locales. Fraser won legions of fans for both his historical accuracy and his droll humor. In Flashman at the Charge (1973), set during the Crimean War, he wrote, “‘Well, here we are, the French and ourselves at war with Russia in order to protect Turkey. Ve-ery good. What shall we do, then? Better attack Russia, eh? H’m, yes. (Pause) Big place, isn’t it?’”

Fraser also wrote several non-Flashman novels and nonfiction works, as well as many screenplays, including The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers, The Prince and the Pauper, and the James Bond film Octopussy. He died of cancer on the Isle of Man, where he had lived for 35 years for tax reasons.