DON GONYEA, HOST:
In the 1960s, no one played the piano quite like Oscar Peterson.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "I LOVE YOU")
GONYEA: And if you were in Detroit back then, there was no better place to hear it than Baker's Keyboard Lounge. The legendary jazz pianist and composer was outstandingly prolific during his decades-long career, constantly touring the world while releasing more than 200 recordings. But one recording his trio taped at Baker's at the end of a two-week engagement in 1960 was never released. In fact, it was lost for more than 60 years. That is until the aging reel-to-reel tape was discovered in a mislabeled box at Verve Records. Engineers salvaged the tape's contents, and Verve has now released the complete recordings of "Oscar Peterson: At Baker's Keyboard Lounge."
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "I LOVE YOU")
GONYEA: Mark Stryker wrote the liner notes for the newly released recording of this fabulous night at Baker's. He was a longtime jazz critic for the Detroit Free Press and is a true expert on the Detroit jazz scene. I met him in the very lounge where this record was taped all those years ago. In fact...
We're tucked into a booth across from the stage. Mark Stryker, welcome.
MARK STRYKER: Well, thank you very much, Don. It's a pleasure to be here with another Detroiter in such an iconic spot in our great city.
GONYEA: So just paint the picture for us a little bit. What would this place have looked like that night when Oscar Peterson's trio played here in 1960?
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "THE TOUCH OF YOUR LIPS")
STRYKER: Well, one of the extraordinary things is that it looked pretty much exactly like it looks right now. We are sitting in a very cozy booth.
GONYEA: (Laughter).
STRYKER: I mean, we are...
GONYEA: Elbow to elbow here.
STRYKER: ...You know, elbow to elbow, to say the least (laughter). And - but we are directly in front of the stage. If you look around, you can see black-and-white striped walls. You can see everybody in the place has a view of the stage - a good one. You know, if you were thinking about the - sort of the quintessential jazz club from the middle of the 20th century, add a bunch of cigarette smoke here, and you would have it.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "THE TOUCH OF YOUR LIPS")
GONYEA: And this was a two-week run, and they recorded one particular night. But that's a pretty long residency, it feels like.
STRYKER: You know, in the old days, which is to say, back in the 1960s - '50s and '60s - two weeks would have been a nice, long run for The Oscar Peterson Trio.
GONYEA: And this particular booking, a couple of weeks, he was just, like, the latest in a line of national, well-known jazz acts that came through over the course of the months and years?
STRYKER: Yes. I mean, Baker's was certainly one of the top jazz rooms in Detroit, which means, at that point in 1960, it would have been one of the top jazz rooms in the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "DJANGO")
STRYKER: This is a place where many of the best-known musicians in jazz would play. So the audience would have been well-heeled. They would have been well-dressed. They would have been integrated. This would have been a night out. It would have been a glamorous kind of place to be.
GONYEA: The stage is right here. Do we know where the piano would have been, where the drummer would have been set up on this particular night?
STRYKER: I am fairly confident that the piano was stage left as we look. So going left to right, we'd see piano, bass and drums, and they would have been in a tight little triangle. This would have been a Steinway B. One of the great pieces of history in Baker's is that piano was picked out for the club by the great Art Tatum. And what's so poetic about that is that Oscar's biggest influence was Art Tatum. So to see Oscar playing the piano that Art Tatum, himself, had picked out - it's like hearing a rabbi read the Torah that Moses was given by God on Mount Sinai.
GONYEA: (Laughter).
STRYKER: That's what it would have been like to see Oscar play that piano.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "AUTUMN LEAVES")
GONYEA: OK. So what was it about Oscar Peterson at the piano? Everybody has their own approach to the instrument. Everybody has their own style, their own touch. What was it about Oscar Peterson?
STRYKER: Well, the first thing is that he was a true virtuoso - I mean, a virtuoso at the highest level of just simply playing the instrument, in terms of the speed with which he could play, the cleanliness of the lines. There's a lilt to his swing and a drive to his swing, both.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "AUTUMN LEAVES")
STRYKER: A fire, and yet, also an elegant kind of courtliness at his best that was totally captivating.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "AUTUMN LEAVES")
STRYKER: For many people, Oscar represented kind of the quintessential jazz pianist.
GONYEA: So I've also heard what is kind of an unusual criticism of a performer - that he was maybe too good.
STRYKER: Well, virtuosity can be a double-edged sword because when people have that kind of technique, they like to throw it around and show off, and the music can become overcrowded. It can become glib.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "SCRAPPLE FROM THE APPLE")
STRYKER: There's no question of, like, the emotional depth and the range of emotion that one might get out of the piano as the musician is improvising. And I think what is particularly great about Oscar Peterson live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge is that mostly what we hear here is Oscar at his best.
GONYEA: Let's talk about one song that caught my ear - "Chicago," it's called.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "CHICAGO")
GONYEA: You write that this is a tour de force of Byzantine details. What do you hear in that song?
STRYKER: Well, the arrangement goes through so many different sections and contrasting rhythmic fields, and the time signatures change. And the keys change, and sometimes it's in two beats. Sometimes it's in four beats. Sometimes Oscar is playing single-note lines.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "CHICAGO")
STRYKER: All this stuff is happening that is creating a kind of complex orchestration in the moment that is very exciting to hear. It's like a cliffhanger, right?
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "CHICAGO")
GONYEA: And what's your sense of the audience here that night and how they were reacting to what he was playing?
STRYKER: Well, you can hear it on the record. I mean, the audience is completely captivated, totally into it. And you can hear that musicians themselves are inspired by that audience feedback. Look, we have very, very sophisticated, hip audiences in Detroit because Detroit had one of the greatest jazz scenes in the country at that point in 1960. I mean, we were the - one of the primary feeders of talent to the national scene in 1960. That meant that our musicians here were as great as anywhere in the country, including New York. So our audiences knew what they were listening to.
GONYEA: Oh, to have been in Baker's Keyboard Lounge on that night in August of 1960.
STRYKER: Yeah, no kidding.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE OSCAR PETERSON TRIO'S "THE TOUCH OF YOUR LIPS")
GONYEA: That's Mark Stryker in the corner booth at the historic Baker's Keyboard Lounge in Detroit. Mark, thanks for sharing a glass with me here.
STRYKER: What a great pleasure, Don. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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