Mike Longo Trio Celebrates Oscar Peterson

About “Mike Longo Trio live Celebrates Oscar Peterson”

Jazz at the Philharmonic, featuring Lester Young, Flip Phillips, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Oscar Peterson, and Ray Brown, among others, passed through Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when Mike Longo was in the tenth grade, and the budding teenage jazz pianist and a drummer friend went to see the show. The friend was knocked out by Krupa and Rich’s drum battle. For Longo, witnessing Peterson’s intensely swinging piano virtuosity in person was a life-changing experience.

Fast-forwarding some seven or eight years to Chicago in 1961, Longo is introduced to the master. “How’d you like to study with me?” Peterson asked Longo after hearing him play. Bassist Michael Longo Sr. drove his son to Toronto, where Peterson was then running the Advanced School of Contemporary Music, found him an apartment, and paid six months’ rent in advance. Longo Jr. covered the remainder of expenses by doing two gigs nightly—dance music in the evening, jazz after hours—during his six months of private lessons with the Canadian piano great. The teacher wouldn’t see his student again until six years later, at the Town Tavern in Toronto, where Longo was working as the pianist for trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, one of Peterson’s major musical influences.

“He was a stickler for not playing like anyone but yourself,” Longo says about Peterson in the booklet notes for the terrific new The Mike Longo Trio Celebrates Oscar Peterson Live on the CAP (Consolidated Artists Productions) label. Recorded on June 25, 2013, at the John Birks Gillespie Auditorium in the New York City Baha’i Center with onetime Gillespie bassist Paul West and former Peterson drummer Ray Mosca, the disc finds Longo playing very much like himself in a well-chosen set of tunes the prolific Peterson had recorded over the years. Six were composed by jazzmen: Duke Ellington’s “Love You Madly,” Thad Jones’s “A Child Is Born,” Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose,” Nat Adderley’s “Work Song,” Thelonious Monk’s “52nd Street Theme,” and Clifford Brown’s “Daahoud.” The remainder comes from the so-called Great American Songbook: “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Always,” “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” “Love for Sale,” “Yesterdays,” “Tenderly,” and “I Remember You.”

The new CD, like Longo’s previous CAP album with West and Mosca—A Celebration of Diz and Miles, recorded a year earlier at the Gillespie Auditorium—was done with no rehearsal whatsoever. None was really needed, considering the three musicians’ familiarity with the repertoire and with each other.

“I just gave ’em a list of tunes, and we played,” the pianist explains. “Some of the tunes I had never played before in public. We just winged it. I prepared myself for the concert, but the bass player and drummer didn’t know what I was gonna play until that night. I gave Paul some lead sheets in case he didn’t know the tunes or the keys I was gonna play them in. It was all spontaneous. Like ‘52nd Street Theme’ and ‘Fascinating Rhythm’ are two we had never played together before. We just hit it—counted four and started blowing.”