Blues Etude - Oscar Peterson

 

Blues Etude

Blues Etude

Oscar Peterson

Featuring Ray Brown, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes

Produced by Richard S. Sherman

Cover Illustration: George Roth

Photo: Chester Sheard

Limelight LM 82039

1966

From the back cover: Oscar Peterson has led, really, three trios (if you except one he had during his formative years in Montreal) in the course of his career. He had a duo that consisted over himself and bassist Ray Brown just before the start of the 1950s. Then came the first trio. It included himself and Ray and a guitarist. The guitarist during most of this period was Herb Ellis. So tight, so integrated, did the group become that when Ellis announced that he was leaving to settle in Los Angeles, a good many of Peterson's admirers were genuinely concerned. What would Oscar do now?

What he did was to hire drummer Edmund Thigpen. And before long, this new group had become as beautifully cohesive as the previous trio, though its sound was of course utterly different. Oscar played a different way than he had with the predecessor group, inevitably. His playing expanded. This trio persisted for six years. They Ray Brown too succumbed to the blandishments of California and, like Herb Ellis before him, elected to settle in Los Angeles. And at the same time, Edmund Thigpen to strike out on his own as the leader of his own group.

Though all of this was amicable, it came as a melancholy disruption for Oscar. Just at the personal level, it was an unhappy event: he and Ray were (and are) as close as two musicians could be. They'd been together more than 15 years – an association whose length was unusual, to say the least, in the turbulent world of music. And now he had no rhythm section at all.

The solution to the problem surprised everyone. He hired a rhythm section that had already worked together for more than five years, a rhythm section whose conception and time feeling couldn't have been more different from his old one. He hired the Cannonball Adderley Sextet rhythm section. Bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis Hayes made the move with Cannonball's encouragement: a rhythm section is more thoroughly exposed to public attention in a trio than in a sextet and he urged them to take the opportunity.

Now the question was how they would fit themselves to Oscar's style of playing, and vice versa. The group went into rehearsal at Oscar's home in Toronto, Canada. Before long Oscar felt ready to expose it, and he took it on the road. Word began to spread within the music world: this was another excellent trio, and a somewhat new Oscar Peterson.

The enclosed disc is the first recording of this new group. Actually the recording marks a transitional period in the history of the Oscar Peterson trio, since Ray Brown is heard on some of the tracks and Sam Jones on others. Louis Hayes is on all of the tracks. What we hear in the tracks with Sam Jones and Louis Hayes is a different Oscar Peterson – fully and obviously related to the old one, to be sure, but playing in a somewhat different way.

All three members of the new trio are masters of the subtle and little-under-stood art of swinging, and they have learned to swing together. Oscar has bent toward them, they have leaned toward him. In the middle ground they have found an area of common conception. And one can hear Oscar's excitement and sense of discovery in playing with Sam Jones and Louis Hayes.

The group can perhaps be called the Oscar Peterson Trio, Mark III. It is an exciting as its predecessors and, in the expansion of Oscar's own playing that it has produced, it is even more so. – Gene Lees (Gene Lees is a well-known critic, lyricist and writer. He is the author of a novel about the music world, And Sleep Until Noon.)

Side 1

Blue Etude

Shelley's World

Let's Fall In Love

The Shadow Of Your Smile (Love Theme from the "Sandpiper")

Sam Jones - Bass

Recorded 5/4/66

Side 2

If I Were A Bell

Stella By Starlight

Bossa Beguine

L'Impossible

I Know You Oh So Well

Ray Brown - Bass

Recorded 12/3/65