Piano geniuses play ghost notes.
Those are the sounds made by depressing a piano key halfway, without making a sound, and playing another chord at the same time.
But what do the ghosts play?
You can find out in Fountain Valley, where the amazing Oscar Peterson, jazz pianist of the highest order, is opening a tour that includes stops in New York City and Washington, D.C. You can see Peterson’s work daily until the second week of August at Keyboard Concepts (18285 Euclid St.), his Bösendorfer piano surrounded by black velvet ropes.
The interesting thing about Peterson’s performance – aside from the intricate ghost notes and the virtuoso foot pedaling – is that the jazz man died in 2007.
“This is ‘Star Trek’ futuristic stuff,” said Joe Toscano, the store manager, who is selling 12 specially made Oscar Peterson Bösendorfers for $190,000 apiece. Each piano includes the Disklavier technology that captured Peterson’s every nuance. The keys and pedals move to vibrate the strings across the spruce wood sound board. There are no speakers, no recorded sounds.
“If he walked in that door right now, he would say, ‘Wow, that’s me on the piano,’” said Simon Oss, Premium Piano marketing manager for Yamaha, which put together the technology and the piano to honor Peterson. “The people who see it can’t believe it because it’s so real.”
How do you get a piano to play like that? And would it pass the test when played before his widow, Kelly Peterson, who lives just outside Toronto?
• • •
Oscar Peterson, who would be 90 if he were alive today, had been a piano phenomenon since the late 1930s. Born in Canada, he learned classical music, then traditional jazz. The legend goes that his sister, Daisy, taught him during marathon practice sessions. He won the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s radio contest at 14.
In the late 1940s, Peterson began working with Norman Granz, who introduced the young whiz at Carnegie Hall in New York.
Over the years, Peterson worked with Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and other jazz legends. He was known for the speed and precision of his fingers through bass lines and boogie woogies for more than six decades.
Peterson fell in love with the Bösendorfer piano in the 1970s and had an exclusive relationship with the Austrian company for 30 years until 2006.
In the early 1980s, Peterson used a Pianocorder to record 13 songs and put them away, waiting for technology to advance to the point where his sounds could be accurately reproduced.
About that same time, he met the woman who would become his fourth wife.
• • •
She was 25, and he was 55. She worked as the night manager at a restaurant called Charley’s Crabs in Sarasota, Fla.
It was February 1981 when Oscar Peterson came in to Charley’s after a concert because no other place was open.
“I was trying to keep him from being disturbed by other people,” Kelly Peterson said in a phone interview. “He was very sweet and charming.”
At the end of the evening, he gave her his business card and invited her to see him play at the Newport Jazz Festival in New York that year. She had seen him in concert as a child. She was a huge fan.
Then he started calling the restaurant from wherever he played around the world. He kept insisting she come to New York to be his guest. But her boss wouldn’t give her the time off.
She went anyway.
“A friendship turned into a romance,” she said.
She remembered he had told her about 13 songs he had recorded and put away.
“He said he played the piano with a machine that recorded everything,” Kelly Peterson said. “He was so enthusiastic.”
They moved in together in 1986. They got married in 1990. Their daughter, Celine, was born in 1991.
Oscar Peterson had a long career that continued into 2006. But arthritis began to take his dexterity, and Alzheimer’s disease began to take his mind. Kelly Peterson remembered him playing the same song twice at a concert.
“Life was harder,” she said. “He would tell the same story over and over.”
Oscar Peterson died Dec. 23, 2007.
• • •
In the big business world of pianos, some of the giants came together over time. Yamaha bought Pianocorder. Then Yamaha bought Bösendorfer.
Oss remembered sitting at a meeting in 2014 with Brian Kemble at Bösendorfer. One of them – he can’t remember who – suggested they make an Oscar Peterson commemorative piano that played those 13 songs.
With Kelly Peterson’s permission, they resurrected them. They used Yamaha’s Disklavier technology to measure every movement of every key and every pedal. It took more than a year for Yamaha to perfect the system.
In December, they invited Kelly Peterson to listen to the final product. The black wood box began to moan “Tenderly” as if the jazz man were sitting right in front of her.
“Tears just started flowing,” she said. “Puddles. It was incredible to hear him play again. It was amazing to feel his presence. I could sit at the keyboard and hear what he would have heard.”
She wiped the tears away and wanted to put her ear closer to the sound.
“I stuck my head underneath the hood of the piano,” she said. “To hear those strings, that is incredible.”
As incredible as a ghost.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7898 ksharon@ocregister.com
