MONTREAL (AFP) - Canadian pianist and composer Oscar Peterson has died, bringing the final curtain down on one of the finest jazz careers of the 20th century, media reported Monday. He was 82.
"The world has lost the worlds greatest jazz player," Hazel McCallion, mayor of Petersons hometown of Mississauga in the Toronto suburbs, told CBC News.
Peterson played with all the greats during his six decades in the business with a versatile style that ranged from boogie-woogie to stride to bebop.
The Montreal native succumbed to kidney failure at his Mississauga home on Sunday night, CBC television and Radio-Canada reported.
He defied arthritis and ill health in his later years, and continued to record despite a stroke in 1993 that disabled his left hand.
Even one-handed, he was "still light years ahead of everyone else," according to jazz broadcaster Ross Porter.
"Age doesnt seem to enter into my thought to that great an extent," Peterson said in 2001, according to the Toronto Star newspaper.
"I just figure that the love I have of the instrument and my group and the medium itself works as a sort of a rejuvenating factor for me."
His studio and live partners comprised a roll call of legends, including Roy Eldridge, Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Stan Getz and Lester Young.
A genius at improvisation, Peterson recalled in 2005 how the heat of live free-form jazz could enable "moments of great beauty to emerge."
The Canadian, who won seven Grammy awards for individual recordings plus the Grammy for Lifetime Achievement in 1997, was born in August 1925 to a railway porter father from the West Indies who was a talented amateur pianist.
Overcoming tuberculosis aged seven, young Peterson came under the tutelage of Hungarian classical pianist Paul de Marky, who taught the budding jazz great "technique and speedy fingers."
After winning a CBC radio talent show aged 14, Peterson went on to drop out of school and play on a weekly jazz program before hitting the hotels and music halls of Montreal.
Overcoming the endemic racism of the era, in 1943 he became the first black musician to play in a dance music orchestra in Montreal. He later became a noted campaigner for civil rights.
Aged 24, Petersons international career got off to a sensational start when he was brought on stage at New Yorks Carnegie Hall in 1949 by the impresario Norman Granz, who managed his career for three decades.
Peterson formed his first trio in 1951 and a later threesome with Herb Ellis and Ray Brown was cited by afficionados as one of the worlds finest jazz groups.
"You saw the greatness immediately," Ellis said of Peterson. "He was awesome right away -- always."
Peterson regularly toured European clubs and concert halls, often accompanied by the stellar voice of Ella Fitzgerald. "It makes you want to sing," Fitzgerald, who died in 1996, remarked of Petersons piano playing.
Bob Rae, a former premier of Ontario, described his long-time friend Peterson as "a giant of jazz."
"He was perhaps the best-known Canadian abroad," he told Radio-Canada.
Peterson recorded nearly 200 albums. Perhaps his best-known composition was 1964s Canadiana Suite, each of whose eight tracks was inspired by a region of his native land.
Married four times, Peterson leaves behind six children.
