For the last few years the Forsyth piano showroom has been a popular venue for Manchester Jazz Festival. This continues in 2025 for the 30th Manchester Jazz Festival with James Pearson and his trio performing a tribute to the great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in his centenary year.
Forsyth is a 4th and 5th generation family owned music business that has been in Manchester since 1857. The Forsyth brothers settled in Manchester to help Charles Hallé set up the Hallé orchestra, having learned their trade with their father – the factory manager for Messrs Broadwood in Golden Square, described by Beethoven as the “prince of piano makers”. After initially specialising only in pianos, Forsyth’s soon diversified into supplying sheet music and all other instruments.
Forsyth and Yamaha, have collaborated to provide the mjf2025 piano trail and will also see the return of the competition to find Manchester’s hidden talents, with a whole raft of prizes up for grabs including… a Yamaha digital piano! 16 pianos are located around the city at: The Arndale Centre, The Corn Exchange, Forsyth Music Shop, Aviva Studios, Home of Factory International, Grand Arcade (Wigan), Great Northern, Harvey Nichols, Manchester Central Library, Manchester Piccadilly Station, Quayside MediaCityUK, Royal Exchange Arcade, Spindles Town Square Shopping Centre (Oldham), Spinningfields, HOME, Trafford Palazzo and Manchester Victoria Station.
Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham has said the following about the mjf piano trail “The mjf piano trail will take music back out onto the streets of Manchester, giving more people the chance to try their hand at playing and to encounter the vibrant music of our city in a unique way.”
The concert at Forsyth perhaps brings a slightly different audience to Manchester Jazz Festival as Oscar Peterson’s music is more mainstream than most of the content of the festival. Over the years the festival has tended to concentrate on more cutting edge and contemporary areas of Jazz.
The fact that the concert was sold out in advance suggests there is an audience for this type of Jazz within the festival.
For this concert James Pearson had with him Arnie Somogyi on double bass and Sebastiaan De Krom on drums, two of the leading sidemen on the UK Jazz scene.
After a short drinks reception the concert took place as one long set of approaching 2 hours. James mixed music with some interesting and sometimes amusing anecdotes about Oscar’s life and career.
The piano for the concert was a Bösendorfer, the make played by Oscar on many live concerts and studio recordings over the years.
The concert started with ‘C Jam Blues’ as played on probably his most famous album ‘Night Train’ from 1963.
James related how Oscar had started as a trumpet player but then got tuberculosis and so had to stop playing the trumpet and instead took up piano. His piano teacher had himself studied with someone who had studied with Franz Liszt and so his studies were very classical based. This grounding helped him as he got into Jazz as he had already developed very good technique.
James then told the possibly apocryphal story of how Norman Granz of Jazz At The Philharmonic fame discovered Peterson and how he heard him on the radio whilst taking a taxi to Montreal Airport. He got the taxi driver to take him straight away to the club where the broadcast was coming from. He signed him and then got him to play at Carnegie Hall. As he didn’t have a work permit an opportunity for him to play was created by Grantz by getting Hank Jones to make out he suddenly had arm ache and had to stop. Oscar was then beckoned out of the audience up on stage to play a few tunes without anybody saying who he was. This aspect of the story, also possibly apocryphal, is part of Jazz legend. One of the tunes he played on that occasion was ‘Tenderly’ and at this point the trio played the same.
Another very popular album of Oscar’s is ‘We Get Requests’ from 1964 and from this the trio played ‘Corcovado’ by Antonio Carlos Jobim in a Swing Bossa style.
James talked about Oscar’s appearance on BBC 2’s ‘Jazz 625’ which was recorded while he was in the U.K. doing a stint at Ronnie Scott’s in 1964. The trio played ‘Hallelujah Time’ which was on that broadcast, is one of Oscar’s best known compositions.
Moving forward in time the trio played two pieces from the ‘Canadiana Suite’ written in 1965, ‘Blues of the Prairies’ and ‘Place St. Henri’. The bass part to the latter sounded particularly tricky.
To conclude the concert finished as it had started with another piece from the ‘Night Train’ album, ‘Hymn to Freedom’. James used this piece to show a characteristic way of playing that Oscar was known for referred to as ‘The Rumble’ where rolling chords are allowed to be sustained getting louder and louder. He said it tends to make the piano go out of tune so is normally played at the end of the concert.
