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August 29, 2006
I'll Take "Canadian Pianists That Hum" for $2,000, Alex
So I was waiting for a ride home today, and there happened to be a Wall Street Journal sitting nearby. I rarely read this paper, but it was there.
The front page featured a strange story about theft and fraud and the great (some say) Bach interpreter Glenn Gould. It seems that a prized item containing his "doodles" has been somewhere other than the museum everyone thought it was in, while the one in the museum turns out to be a fake. Or something like that.
The WSJ's front page also contained a teaser for a human interest story in its innards about jazz piano virtuoso Oscar Peterson. Naturally that piqued my interest.
What do Glenn Gould and Oscar Peterson have in common?
1. From Canada, born in roughly the same time period (1932 and 1925, respectively).
2. Played piano with extreme skill.
3. Hummed while playing, on stage and in the recording studio.*
Okay, is that enough to make it odd that they were both featured in the same business-oriented American newspaper on the same day?
What about this? In the Gould story, it was noted that he liked to dine on a certain Hungarian soup as a child. Oscar Peterson's interview mentions an early teacher, Paul de Marky -- who was Hungarian. How many Hungarians were there in Montréal or Toronto in the 1930s?
*Someone once tried to convince me that the humming in Oscar Peterson recordings was actually coming from bassist Ray Brown. I've heard recordings of Peterson without Brown, though, in which the humming can still be heard.
Miscellaneous | By joe lance | 11:54 PM