John Tapscott

Not wanting to get into this at all, but what I would say that on this Board the grain of popular opinion re Peterson ranges somewhere between truly awful and ho-hum (though there are some who really like him.) Maybe 3.5 out of 10

Indeed. And Benny Morton too.

Hmm...not saying you're wrong, but I thought Evans liked Peterson. Certainly Peterson liked Evans and even said that Evans had an influence on his later playing. Oscar often played "Waltz for Debbie."'

I often find myself enjoying the Tatum small group sessions more than the solo sides. While I generally agree with what Peter says about Oscar, I do not believe Oscar "overplays" on this solo album I posted above (and below). While I think valid criticisms of Peterson's playing can be made, I don't think those criticisms can be directed at his playing on this album. As people have pointed out there was the "public" side of Peterson in which he dazzled 2-3000 listeners in a concert hall on a nightly basis (and in doing so sometimes fell into repetitious patterns and used overplayed cliches). On the other hand there was the more "private" Oscar in more intimate settings where his playing was more often like the playing on this album. And Oscar grew over the years, so that this latter aspect of his playing came to the fore even in the big concert settings (though he could never avoid "tearing it up" by the end: that's what people were paying big money to hear).

Not my favorite pianist perhaps, though I often enjoy listening to him. " glib, shallow, mired in cliche, fake-jazz, annoying" Perhaps that's right; I am not a jazz intellectual and don't have the expertise of the jazz PhD's on this Board. But I honestly can't apply these adjectives to this particular solo album (which may arguably be Oscar's best).