First, have a look at the images in the photo gallery at the top of the post. They’re all of Oscar Peterson in Germany, and they’re pretty special, don’t you think?
Peterson spent a lot of time in Villingen, Germany, in the 1960s, where he played private jazz concerts in the home of millionaire Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer. (The Brunner-Schwer family fortune started with a bicycle bell company, a fascinating story in itself.)
In Oscar Peterson: The Will To Swing, by the late Gene Lees, Lees describes the set up at Brunner-Schwer’s home:
“More perfect circumstances in which to make music would be difficult to imagine, and every musician who ever performed for Brunner-Schwer came away vaguely dazed by the experience. Sometimes there was no party at all: Oscar would sit at the piano in shirt sleeves, as at home, and muse pensively on the instrument while Hans Georg, unseen and for the instant forgotten, captured these reflections on tape.”
Part of that perfection was apparently the way the piano was miked.
“He used, in the early days, two microphones, usually Neumanns, placed inside the instrument and so close to the strings that they were almost touching; a much more distant mike placement was usual at the time.”
And part of it was, of course, Peterson’s brilliant playing. He made 15 albums at Villingen in 11 years and he once told Gene Lees that he believed the German recordings (on the MPS label) were the best he’d ever made.
What’s your favourite Oscar Peterson recording?
Thanks to Matthias Brunner-Schwer, Friedhelm Schulz and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany for sharing these wonderful photos.
Related links
Frank Sinatra, Oscar Peterson and the maharaja of the keyboard
Oscar Peterson on being a critical Canadian
Oscar Peterson’s German jazz connection remembered
Oscar Peterson in the Black Forest