Previously Unreleased Peterson from Verve

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Crossover Media)

This past Friday Verve issued an album of previously unreleased performances of the Oscar Peterson Trio. The full title of the album is The Oscar Peterson Trio at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, and it now has an Amazon.com Web page, which only provides an MP3 download of the 27 tracks. The venue is in Detroit, and all of the tracks were recorded in August of 1960.

The other members of the trio are Ray Brown on bass and drummer Ed Thigpen, both major figures in twentieth-century jazz. The album is very much a compilation, since the tracks were recorded over the course of the two weeks during which the trio was playing at Baker’s. The delay in releasing this trove of Peterson performances was due to the fact that the original recordings were only recently discovered in a mislabeled box in the Verve vaults! That was in time for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Peterson’s birth on August 15, 1925. Roughly half a year later, these performances are now available for listening!

Those familiar with this site probably know that my approaches to jazz tend to be (for better or worse) cerebral. Apparently, I have not written about a Peterson album since December of 2021, in which I assigned him to a “trinity,” whose other members were Johann Sebastian Bach and Art Tatum. That release involved both six selections from Duke Ellington’s book and “A Salute to Bach.” The new release steers away from such sources in favor of a wide diversity of both composers and their works. As a result, listening made for an engaging journey of discovery, whether than involved unfamiliar tunes or unfamiliar arrangements.

My interest in Peterson pre-dates my current writing gig. I have anthologies from both MPS in Germany and Verve here in the United States. Nevertheless, regardless of when a recording was made, I find that there is always something I have not yet discovered on at least one of the album tracks. Ellington declared him the “Maharaja of the keyboard,” but Peterson’s friendship with Art Tatum probably says more about his approach to jazz. I have already accumulated fifteen Tatum CDs, but I am still making discoveries while listening to this new set of three!