The Art Of Oscar Peterson's Jazz Piano

Canadian black jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-) is one of the greatest pianists in the jazz history. Though from the viewpoint of originality, he did not bring any historical breakthrough, his jazz piano playing reflects a solid grasp of over half a century's jazz piano tradition spanning from ragtime to hardbop. With a strict logical planning in mind, he boosted the art of jazz, which was basically a kind of improvisation to a new level that had got a similar logical arrangement to that of the western classical music. So he is regarded as a key figure in the mainstream jazz piano history both technically and musically.My dissertation adopts the transcriptions of his performance as the starting point, unfolding through three levels: basic jazz language syntax, stylistic ingredients and logical structure.On the first level, I looked into the most important rule in the mainstream jazz---chord-scale theory, while analyzing the application of this theory in Oscar Peterson's playing. That's the reason why he is positioned as a "mainstream" pianist.On the second level, I cleaned up the concepts of jazz piano styles ranging from ragtime to hardbop, then further analyzed how these basic stylistic techniques were reflected in Oscar Peterson's playing. Firstly we can trace back the roots of his comprehensive style, secondly we are able to check out his personal developments to these stylistic traditions while putting a greater width and breadth to them.On the third level, I picked out several typical structuring methods from the material in hand, arranging them in the sequence of form structure logic, linguistic syntax logic, material developing logic and so on, to specify the unique artistic contribution of Oscar Peterson to jazz piano performance as well as jazz history as a whole.On the fourth level, I looked into the bibliographical material of Oscar Peterson, classified them in the sequence of social environment,family environment,early teachers,psychological...