Oscar Peterson's concert at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night could have been laced with sadness. The 69-year-old pianist is suffering from the side effects of a recent stroke.
He was brought to the stage in a wheelchair, and for much of his brief concert his left hand was only barely functional, occasionally marking time with a few soft notes.But Peterson, who plays more with his right hand than most pianists play with two, still put on a show.
Peterson is one of jazz's last stars, part of a generation that arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His rise as a concert attraction coincided with the demise of jazz as popular music and its renaissance as a more rarefied form floating between the art world and popular culture.
He has traditionally been a controversial figure for critics, who haven't always liked his playing. Yet he has retained his status as a concert artist, consistently drawing some of the largest audiences jazz can muster.
At Carnegie Hall, where he appeared as part of the JVC Jazz Festival, his presence on stage brought a standing ovation from a sold-out house.
Despite the intermittently dreadful backing from a trio of Lorne Lofsky on guitar, Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen on bass and Martin Drew on drums, Peterson never lost his concentration. He still plays with an unperturbable sense of time, placing his phrases just so.
And the way his notes maintained their relationship to the beat was always marvelous and swinging. His sense of rhythm simply makes people feel good, and his touch, the way he draws sound from the piano, is gorgeous, producing a tight, round sound that helped make his lines articulate.
But it was his improvising, especially during the second half, that was often stunning, with high-speed phrases running through the harmony of a piece with an elegant clarity. He is a master of internal rhythms in which notes within a phrase are accented at different times, giving his playing an irregularity that makes a listener pay attention.
Peterson performed a handful of crowd-pleasing pieces, including "Satin Doll" and a blues composition. He played some standards, including "Secret Love," and some original material. He approached each of them from a different angle, varying his rhythms and playing full chords, single-note lines and two- or three-note figures.
Sometimes he hammered at an idea or let a line flow like a torpedo. Some of it was serious, some joking.
All of it spoke of how a life in music can force a musician to cultivate the resources to turn in an emotional performance, even in imperfect circumstances.