Before the world knew his name, Montreal heard him first

On August 15, 1925, in a modest walk-up on rue Delisle in Little Burgundy, a boy was born who would grow up to change the sound of jazz—and help define what it meant to be a Black Canadian artist on the world stage. A hundred years later, the city that shaped Oscar Peterson is finally giving him his due.

Peterson’s centenary has sparked a convergence of tributes across Montreal. A new plaza bearing his name is slated for McGill College Avenue. The Montreal International Jazz Festival staged a major tribute concert. The National Film Board is resurfacing archival works, and public pianos dot the city’s sidewalks in the warmer months—a nod to the man once known as “the Maharaja of the keyboard.”

But this isn’t just a celebration of one musician’s greatness. It’s a return to the source. A full-circle reckoning with how Montreal shaped Oscar Peterson—and how his legacy continues to shape Montreal.

The Harlem of the North

To understand Peterson’s rise, you have to understand Little Burgundy—not just as geography, but as ecosystem. In the early 20th century, this working-class neighbourhood southwest of downtown pulsed with life: railway workers, domestic labourers, and newly arrived Caribbean families making homes near the train lines that brought them here. Peterson’s father, Daniel, was a porter with the Canadian Pacific Railway. His mother, Kathleen, worked as a housekeeper. Music was the connective tissue in the community—spirituals at Union United Church, dances at local halls, jazz seeping in from Harlem via jukeboxes and visiting musicians.

The Petersons were deeply embedded in this musical world. Daniel led a family band that performed at churches and community centres. Each of the five children was expected to learn both a brass instrument and piano. When Oscar was diagnosed with tuberculosis, he gave up trumpet and focused fully on the keyboard. His first teacher was his sister Daisy—a formidable pianist in her own right—who later trained many of the city’s great Black jazz musicians, including Oliver Jones.

But it was his older brother Fred, six years his senior, who first introduced him to jazz. Fred was a gifted pianist in his own right, and his early death from tuberculosis at 16 devastated the family. Peterson later said that had Fred lived, “he would have been the famous jazz pianist, and I’d be his manager.”

Peterson’s early development was also shaped by institutions like the Union United Church and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), both of which saw music not just as art, but as community infrastructure. The UNIA boys’ band included several Peterson siblings. This was not music for applause—it was music for survival, for expression, for dignity in a segregated city.

The break that changed everything

By the time he was 14, Oscar had already won a national radio competition and landed his own weekly show on Montreal’s CKAC. Two years later, he dropped out of high school to join the Johnny Holmes Orchestra—a popular big band where he was both the featured soloist and the only Black musician. At a time when racial segregation kept Black players out of many white clubs, this was a defiant move.

But his true breakout moment came in 1949. Peterson was performing nightly at the Alberta Lounge, a smoky club on Peel and De la Gauchetière. One evening, jazz impresario Norman Granz, en route to the airport, heard Peterson’s live broadcast on the taxi radio. He told the driver to turn the car around.

Weeks later, Peterson walked onstage as a surprise guest at Carnegie Hall, playing alongside the likes of Charlie Parker and Lester Young. His performance, as DownBeat magazine later wrote, "stopped the concert dead cold in its tracks." From that moment on, Peterson wasn’t just a local prodigy—he was a global force.

Jazz, composition, and civil rights

What followed was one of the most prolific careers in jazz history. Peterson recorded over 130 albums, toured relentlessly, and collaborated with legends: Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Stan Getz, among others. His style—blisteringly fast, harmonically lush, swinging with impossible ease—was both virtuosic and unmistakable.

Early on, Peterson had what he called a “bruising” with jazz titan Art Tatum. After bragging about his skills at school, his father played him a Tatum record. Peterson recalled being floored: “I swear, I didn’t play piano for two months afterward.” A few years later, Tatum heard Peterson live and offered a half-mocking benediction: “It’s not your time yet… you’re next.”

He was also a composer of surprising range. His 1962 piece "Hymn to Freedom," inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. His Canadiana Suite painted a sweeping musical portrait of the country he loved: from “Wheatland” to “Place St. Henri.” As Peterson once put it, his aim was to show “a musical portrait of the Canada I love.”

His Canadiana Suite, recorded in 1964, began as a challenge from bassist Ray Brown, who ribbed him into writing a set of pieces instead of wasting time with pranks. “Two pieces is not a suite,” Brown told him. “Canada’s a big, big country.”

Peterson never fully left Montreal behind. He recorded soundtracks here—including for Norman McLaren’s animated short Begone Dull Care—and frequently returned to play the Jazz Festival. Even after moving to Toronto in the 1960s, he maintained close ties to Montreal musicians and institutions.

Montreal’s slow embrace

For all his global acclaim, Peterson’s relationship with his hometown was complicated. Montreal was where he learned to play—but also where he learned what exclusion looked like. As journalist Huda Hassan noted, Black musicians in mid-century Montreal were largely unwelcome in clubs north of downtown, which catered to affluent white patrons. Instead, they built their own scene in Little Burgundy—with spaces like Rockhead’s Paradise serving as creative sanctuaries.

Despite this cultural contribution, recognition came slowly. Concordia University renamed a concert hall in his honour in 1999. The Sud-Ouest borough rechristened a park in Little Burgundy in 2009. A mural followed in 2011, painted by Gene Pendon, with a companion piece for Daisy Peterson Sweeney added in 2018.

The city’s more visible commemorations—like the forthcoming Place Oscar-Peterson on McGill College Avenue—have been criticized for being disconnected from Peterson’s lived geography. As writer Taylor C. Noakes put it, the effort to honour Peterson with a downtown plaza “paradoxically makes no sense from a commemorative vantage point while simultaneously being an excellent political decision.”

Efforts to rename Lionel-Groulx station after Peterson—a metro stop currently honouring a Catholic priest with a record of antisemitic and white supremacist views—have so far failed, despite widespread public support.

The comeback

In 1993, during a set at the Blue Note in New York, Peterson’s left hand betrayed him. He brushed it off mid-performance, but backstage he admitted something wasn’t right. A stroke followed, nearly ending his career—and with it, the full, thunderous left-hand technique that had stunned audiences for decades.

For over a year, he worked to recover, playing scales and spirituals with what strength he had. His first post-stroke concert wasn’t at Carnegie Hall, but at his daughter Céline’s elementary school. Eventually, he returned to clubs and concert halls—not at full capacity, but still with more grace and emotional weight than most pianists dream of. As DownBeat’s John McDonough put it, “Even greater accolades should be afforded him, because he could do what he could do with one hand.”

A centennial reckoning

Still, 2025 feels like a turning point. In July, the Montreal International Jazz Festival held a tribute concert co-produced by Peterson’s daughter Céline. The National Film Board released retrospectives of Peterson’s work, including Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre’s animated documentary Oscar. New public events are scheduled at Parc Oscar Peterson, just blocks from where he grew up.

As Céline Peterson put it in a past interview, her father often said: “I’ve always wanted to feel wanted at home; I’ve always wanted to be respected at home; I’ve always wanted to be honoured at home.”

This centenary, perhaps, is the closest Montreal has come to answering that call.

The sound still resonates

Oscar Peterson was never just one thing. He was a virtuoso, a composer, an educator, a mentor. He was a Black Montrealer who grew up in a segregated city and built an international career without erasing where he came from. He was a Canadian artist whose work stood proudly in dialogue with Harlem, Paris, Tokyo, and beyond.

Some critics argued Peterson’s technical brilliance came at the expense of soul. French jazz magazine Le Jazz Hot once claimed he lacked “that profound sense of the blues.” Peterson’s fans—and peers—disagreed. “Maybe jazz is supposed to sound clumsy,” pianist Jon Weber once quipped, “but from the first four bars, I hear his heart and soul in every note.”

His legacy lives on in his recordings, yes—but also in the institutions he inspired, the students his sister taught, and the sound of a piano echoing out from a Little Burgundy window.

A hundred years later, Montreal is still learning how to hold all that he was. And that, in its own way, is the truest kind of tribute.