Night Train

Benny Green, one time jazz critic of The Observer, begins his sleevenotes for this UK pressing of The Oscar Peterson Trio's Night Train with a heavy-duty literary reference: "'The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect,' wrote Proust, 'in some material object we do not suspect'". Green is thereby setting up his contention that "it is a brave man indeed who would make an album composed of material which he knows belongs to the past consciousness of those likely to listen to it", a roundabout way of explaining most of the tracks here were well-worn, familiar standards by 1962, when the album was recorded.

The telescoping effect of time's passing inevitably gives the listener from a later generation a foreshortened perspective and a less acute sense of the historical truth: I know in the abstract that Duke Ellington's 'C-Jam Blues', for example, evokes the early '40s rather than the early '60s, but I can never feel that in the way that Oscar Peterson (or Benny Green) could. One can still, from a remoter vantage point, get a sense of the affectionate warmth in these renditions, and appreciate the abundant skill with which they were performed.

In tasteful deference to these classics, Peterson keeps some of his prodigious virtuosity in reserve, but he does allow it to come more into the foreground in the closing track, the sole original composition on the record, 'Hymn to Freedom'. At its thunderous climax it sounds like a roomful of pianos are being played all at once, with that room, moreover, about to achieve lift-off.