When extraordinarily prolific filmmaker Barry Avrich (seriously, check his IMDB) turned his attention to the story of one of the greatest jazz musicians ever, the remarkable pianist Oscar Peterson, he had to find a way to illuminate the life of an uncontroversial genius. Oscar Peterson wasn’t notorious in any way – he even was kind to the musicians in his band (not something you can often say for people operating on his level of greatness).
Avrich met this challenge by doing what Oscar often did – he let the music do most of the talking. And man, can that piano of Oscar’s talk. The first 40 minutes of the film unfurls at a near breakneck pace, matching Oscar’s relentless musicianship. Oscar Peterson was an extraordinary musician, and by all accounts, a sweet man.
Through Avrich’s film, you discover that’s more than enough to tell the tale of a man so lauded in his home country of Canada, that one can scarcely count the monuments to his name and likeness. And through Oscar Peterson: Black + White, you will have no trouble understanding how his quiet legend came to be.
Awards Daily: Oscar Peterson is not only a jazz legend, but also an icon in his and your home country of Canada. Did your own Canadian roots draw to his story?
Barry Avrich: The interesting thing is that when I first got exposed to Oscar Peterson, I didn’t even know that he was Canadian. We Canadians get sort of insecure and nervous about geo-targeting anybody from one country or another. As Canadians you feel that whether I’m a film director or a musician, you have to travel with your international acclaim and your press clippings to be accepted back home. Oscar found his fame in the United States and so I didn’t even know he was Canadian. At the age of nine my mother took me to a concert of his in Montreal. I was blown away because I loved Jazz even at that age. She didn’t tell me he was Canadian either. I sort of discovered that later on. Amongst my parents’ nine LPs in a cabinet in the basement, Oscar’s “Night Train” was there, so I was listening to him but had no idea what his background was. It just amazed me when I woke up one day and wanted to do another music documentary and realized there really had not been a definitive documentary about him and then I said, “alright let’s do it.”
Awards Daily: Did the film you made about David Foster inform and excite you about doing another film on a musical figure?
Barry Avrich: 100%. I love getting into the behind the scenes of how music is made. I’ve got this dream to do the Barbra Streisand documentary – she’s aware of it, I want to do it, and maybe one day she’ll consider me. I am in love with the whole idea of music docs now and I’ll tell you it really came from being at the Toronto Film Festival and seeing “Standing in the Shadows of Motown” which set the structure for this film. Every time you make a documentary you always ask yourself, “what can I do that’s different?” That’s where the structure of this film came into play in terms of having live performances by musicians of today playing Oscar’s music. That set the tone to let the audience take a breather between Oscar’s freight train-like playing of insane incredible music and let the audience take a break by seeing live musicians play his music. “Standing in the Shadows of Motown” did that, as did “Twenty Feet from Stardom.” To follow a little bit on their heels and make documentaries on musicians, it was quite exciting for me.
Awards Daily: We get about half through the film before politics or much of Oscars’ personal life is exposed. Before then, it’s almost wall to wall music.
Barry Avrich: Great observation. Two comments to that, one is, as Oscar says at the beginning of the film, “I came to play.” He was not a complicated man. It was music that drove him. Our first cut of the film was way longer and there were times where I would sit with my producer Mark Selby and my editor and say “My God, it’s too ferocious. It’s relentless,” which is what Oscar’s music can be. We need to find our moments and our beats to breathe on that. Unlike some of the other artists, whether it’s Miles or Chet or Coltrane, there’s no drugs. There’s no scandal. I probably will be criticized for not showing the depth of who Oscar was. But he just loved playing. What blew me away about him, was the generosity towards the musicians he played with. This was not James Brown in terms of fining his musicians and Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry coming out and just making it about them and smashing instruments. Oscar really believed in the sum of all parts and was even reluctant to have a solo career. This is a celebration of an art form, a celebration of him. It’s not a Michael Moore or an “E! True Hollywood Story” or a “Finding Neverland.” That’s just not what this is.
Awards Daily: While he was an absolute titan in his art form, do you think the fact that he was so uncontroversial has impacted how well known he is?
Barry Avrich: You’re right, there was no controversy that followed him. He also spent his formative years in Canada. He would tour the United States, so he just wasn’t present in the United States. I use the analogy of Norman Jewison, the famous film director who people sadly often forget. It’s because he chose to live in Toronto. Oscar lived in Toronto. He was touring and he was a musician’s musician. People knew him, but he just wasn’t that guy living in the United States and having that presence. I think that was certainly part of it and one of the reasons why I wanted to make the film, being Canadian. He is a treasure that is forgotten. He should be on that Mount Rushmore of Jazz. What amazed me was when we started finding footage in Denmark and Tokyo and Sweden of performances that nobody had ever really seen. It was quite amazing. What a phenomenon he was and a relentless musician, but also a touring guy that not only cut his own albums but also was on hundreds of others artists’ albums as the must-have musician.
Awards Daily: I was stunned by the amount of live footage you uncovered. It’s really spectacular, and from a time when not everything that happened was recorded.
Barry Avrich: That was part of the mission in this film. I was amazed watching the Janet Jackson documentary recently – they were so lucky to have the home movies that her former husband took. With Oscar there wasn’t a lot of home movie stuff, however we hit gold in that many of these broadcasters from across the world (Copenhagen, Sweden, Tokyo) had performances in their archives, which was quite amazing and it also drove a bit of the structure. Also, Oscar was very articulate. Many musicians don’t want to talk, they’re not comfortable, they’d rather be playing. Oscar was not only a born musician, but a born storyteller. I wanted him to tell his story, not me, throughout the film, through every milestone and decade of his life. I remember years ago working with Miles Davis, you just wondered whether he would even face the audience or not, and you weren’t going to have a big long conversation with him. Whereas Oscar was an entertainer. Those interviews that we found in archives and in vaults around the world, there were tons of it which was really great. As a documentary filmmaker you pray for that and you rarely find it.
Awards Daily: He had a mellifluous voice. I could listen to him speak French all day.
Barry Avrich: Growing up in Montreal, he grew up in a French area and obviously his father like my father said “If you’re gonna survive in Montreal you better learn how to speak French fluently.” He spoke it way better than I ever did. He was just really a triple sensation, not only as a musician, but as a singer, and a composer too.
Awards Daily: A real discovery for me in the film was the impact Norman Granz had on jazz and jazz musicians. I knew very little about his influence.
Barry Avrich: Nor did I. You can’t tell the story of Oscar without Norman who discovers him and literally hears him on a radio in a taxi on the way to the airport and says “Turn this taxi around. I want to hear him.” Norman ends up being a great discoverer of the genre and believes that this music shouldn’t be in smoky basement clubs, and he really legitimized Jazz as an art form. He was a civil rights pioneer too in protecting his artists on the road. We’ve all seen documentaries dealing with incredible stories of discrimination and racism then, today, and it wasn’t really until Green Book that I understood what the artists had gone through on the road. When I saw Green Book at the Toronto Film Festival, I had no idea at that point that I would be making an Oscar Peterson film. That film definitely influenced me to say “Wait a minute, this is full circle in terms of what Oscar experienced on the road and how Norman would protect him.”
Awards Daily: In some ways, his discovery of southern racism in America is quite heartbreaking. You can tell he was not used to the depth of that hatred.
Barry Avrich: Exactly. I didn’t cover it in the film, but there is certainly some of it in Montreal in terms of that time period like anywhere else. He does write in his book about taking his daughter to her first day of school and experiencing a horrendous racist comment towards him and his daughter. He just rolled with it for the times. Being on the road, when he would come off stage, touring in the South and the audiences would go for the meet and greet, they would be thrilled to meet him. They would tell him that they loved his performance. Oscar being Oscar, a teddy bear of a man, would go out to either hug or shake hands with his fans and they would go “Oh no no no, it just means we love your music. We’re not going to touch you.” That was surprising to him. Not being able to use the bathroom in a theater or a hotel that he was playing at, they would say “No no you can go use the outhouse,” that was new to him as well. He certainly wasn’t in Canada at his age being told he must stay at a black hotel.
Awards Daily: It’s that old story, white people loving black entertainers and their culture, but not respecting them as people.
Barry Avrich: Right. It was shocking to him. You’re suddenly propelled into this massive career where Norman sneaks him into Carnegie Hall as a visitor, and then suddenly you’re on tour with some of the great artists. Then you’re feeling that mix of oppression and adulation, it’s an insane combination. It’s one thing for an artist that comes off stage in front of 100,000 people and go back to the hotel room and have to suffer not being able to emulate the feeling of applause and adulation. For Oscar to have adulation and then that racism and loneliness was traumatic. It was like walking out of a hot pool in the winter.
Awards Daily: The film is almost an hour in before it gets really personal with his last wife, Kelly. She was like a secret weapon in the film.
Barry Avrich: When you are making a documentary, you start off not wanting to be necessarily chronological but you’re covering a life, which is again why we had these sort of musical interludes. I wanted to save Kelly because being on the road, as Oscar describes, is extraordinarily lonely. You’re trying to find something to complement your life so there were multiple marriages. Then he happens to meet Kelly, it’s a very charming story, in Sarasota, Florida and next thing you know she’s pregnant and it does become his last and most enduring relationship of his life. So, it did make sense to sort of keep her for that moment. We were thrilled that she agreed to be very candid in their meeting as well as his death.
Awards Daily: Speaking of Oscar’s death, Kelly’s retelling of it, and how his dog, Smedly, tries to wake him, is just heartbreaking.
Barry Avrich: You feel like you’re in that room. When we screened this film in the Toronto Film Festival, you felt the audience tense up and you see people get extraordinarily emotional and many cry. We’ve all been through a loss, but to be in that moment as she describes it in real time was something.
Awards Daily: There’s a reference to jazz being America’s classical music. You really feel those two arts collide when Love Ballade is performed.
Barry Avrich: Which is why we wanted Measha Brueggergosman, who for your readers might not be super recognizable but she’s a spectacular opera/pop singer. This was Mark Selby’s, my producer, inspiration to sort of figure out how we interpret Love Ballade and that’s where Measha came in to do that as this beautiful tribute to Kelly, and also put an articulation of Oscar’s sound in words to that beautiful piece.
Awards Daily: No lyrics. Just her voice being an instrument.
Barry Avrich: Exactly right, that’s why we felt that she would do it. We made this film in just under eight months, and got very lucky due to COVID, in that the artists were available. Not only to play, they were thrilled to be back into a space and perform Oscar’s music and get together. None of them had toured in a year. Also to be able to have access to Billy Joel, Ramsey Lewis, Herbie Hancock, and the others because they were home. Otherwise I’d be chasing them and this film would have taken much longer. Oscar’s style of music and his playing drove the pace of the editing and this production process. Every time you’re in a room, you’re moving. It’s almost the pace that dictates everything surrounding the making of this film.
Awards Daily: You can feel that throughout the film. The editing is very connected to the music.
Barry Avrich: 100%. The editor (Nicolas Kleiman) was chosen because he’s this Argentinian, who’s as frenetic as Oscar playing – he’s emotional, he’s passionate, and we just knew he would understand the story-telling and the pace that we wanted.
Awards Daily: In Canada, there are streets and schools named after him, murals and statues have been erected. His impact socially here in America isn’t quite as obvious, but it does exist in surprising ways. Like his composition “Hymn to Freedom” being performed at Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Barry Avrich: I didn’t know that either until we started to explore “Hymn to Freedom” and looking at various covers of that and who has sung it and who has performed it. and then the Obama stuff came up sort of late in the game as we were editing. I certainly remember watching the inauguration on television and in the American coverage of it, I don’t think anybody went “This is Oscar Peterson’s song” or Obama from what I can remember explaining why he had selected it, but that was really quite moving for us. And certainly Norman who had encouraged him. Oscar was in the studio working on an album and was just playing on the piano and had developed that sequence, that melody and the Martin Luther King assassination had happened and Norman encouraged Oscar to develop the piece. His response to what had happened and then the lyrics were added in later made for a beautiful song..
Awards Daily: A couple of times you mentioned that you discovered things about Oscar late in the filming. That made me wonder, hen you are making a documentary about someone’s life, do you ever feel done?
Barry Avrich: Such a great question. I’m in the middle of two other documentaries right now; one called Sacrilege about terrorism in Europe that Brian Cox has narrated, and you’re constantly discovering new stories. When is your work ever finished? It’s one of the things that haunts me constantly in documentary filmmaking. I’m doing another one called The Talented Mr. Rosenberg about a con artist and you’re finding other victims and other little pieces. I try to keep both films open and alive as breathing organisms to get everything in until the last possible moment. Even on Sacrilege I found an important sequence about a victim in France. Even though we’re in color-correction, we’re in post, “no no this has to go in.” It’s a great question, no one has ever asked me that before. It is true. Are you ever completely finished on that end of it? Why didn’t you think of this? Why didn’t I ask that? My post people know and it drives them nuts. Tomorrow I’m going to a sound mix for “Sacrilege” and they know even in that sound mix I might say, “Hey, I think we need to put this in.” (Laughs).
Oscar Peterson: Black + White is streaming now on Hulu.