Ever since I can remember (I think it started with my father’s 78s) I listened to the big bands. Duke. Basie. You’d learn the names of the sidemen, catch a solo, and then years later find those same musicians leading bands of their own. That’s how you start to hear jazz as a lineage rather than a list of famous names.
Oscar Peterson came onto my radar early, through a Montreal newspaper, because Oscar was one of ours. Little Burgundy.
Another Montrealer from Little Burgundy died yesterday: Oliver Jones, at 91.
Born there to Barbadian parents, he studied from the age of eight with Daisy Peterson Sweeney: Oscar’s sister, the teacher who taught the neighborhood’s children, including her own younger brother. Two of them came up fifteen blocks apart under the same hands.
He was a fixture at the Montreal Jazz Festival every year from 1981 to 1999, which is when I discovered him. The smile. And he always made a point of speaking to the crowd in French. He played the standards, of course, and his own compositions too.
He’d been performing since he was five, but the wider jazz world didn’t find him until he was nearly fifty. In 1981 he became the resident pianist at Biddle’s, a Montreal institution, and Live at Biddle’s Jazz & Ribs became his debut record and the first release on Justin Time. Over the years that followed he recorded with Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Ed Thigpen and Red Mitchell.
That’s how it went: the room knew first, and everyone else caught up two decades later.
He and Oscar had known each other since childhood, but they didn’t play together in public until the Festival in 1988. Oliver was 53. They came back to it on July 10, 2004, at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier: Oscar’s quartet, Oliver opening, and then Oliver joining him at the second piano for the encore. They played “Hymn to Freedom.” A sold-out hall in the city that made them both.
He never hesitated to name Oscar as his inspiration. He once described being at Oscar’s place, the two of them looking at each other and saying, my God, what would our fathers say now? and answering it themselves: they’d look down and say, yeah, those boys did alright.
Now, I have a test for how good a musician is. I don’t look for reviews. I don’t care what the critics say, how many records were sold, or how famous anyone is. There’s only one test worth its salt:
Who agrees to play with them when they call?
At one of the “Oliver Jones and Friends” sessions at the Festival, the friends included Clark Terry and Herb Ellis. Legends and giants in their own right: Terry taught both Quincy Jones and Miles Davis in St. Louis before either was anybody.
He called. They showed up.
That’s the whole verdict, and no critic can issue it.
I already miss you, Oliver.
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