SCP Jazz offers just third-ever performance of Oscar Peterson’s Africa Suite

After the celebrated pianist and composer Oscar Peterson died in 2007, his wife Kelly began thinking of how best to manage and burnish the jazz legend’s legacy. “I still pinch myself about all the experiences I had during the years we were together,” she says. “And I feel very dedicated to ensuring that as long as I’m alive and capable, Oscar’s legacy will be vibrant and active.”

Her efforts include issuing new recordings of never-before-heard music, as well as unreleased archival material. “There are still many more compositions that no one has heard because no one has played them,” Kelly says. “And he wrote a lot of music that he didn’t perform. So there’s quite a lot of music still to come.”

This year marks the centennial of Peterson’s birth in Montreal, Canada, and Kelly is once again involved in presenting his well-known but little heard Africa Suite in its entirety. It premiered in Toronto in early 2020 and was performed again last year in San Francisco. The next performance, only the third-ever, will occur on June 13 at Symphony Center when John Clayton conducts Benny Green on piano, Christian McBride on bass, Lewis Nash on drums and Dan Wilson on guitar, along with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra. Clayton also arranged the suite’s eight movements: Night Cry, Ellington Looks at Africa, Night in Transvaal, Peace, Nigerian Marketplace, Tribal Dance, The Fallen Warrior and Soweto Saturday Night. Many of them are based on Peterson’s rough synthesizer tracks that were stored on tapes in his home recording studio. The group also will play a separate but related ninth piece, which Peterson wrote in the 1960s, called Hymn to Freedom.

Composed piecemeal over many years starting in the late 1970s but never fully recorded or performed during Peterson’s lifetime, Africa Suite was partly inspired by South Africa’s apartheid struggle and also its world-famous freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela, who after his 27-year imprisonment became the country’s president. But until its 2020 premiere, only a few of the suite’s movements — Nigerian Marketplace, Peace and The Fallen Warrior — were known to the general public via Peterson’s albums and concerts. Played in tandem with Hymn to Freedom on Peterson’s 1982 live album “Freedom Song,” The Fallen Warrior in particular was composed for and dedicated to Mandela while Mandela was still in prison, but at a time when Peterson’s music was still banned in South Africa. In 1998, eight years after Mandela was released, he finally got a chance to hear it.

“Africa Suite is part of my endeavor to make people more aware of what a prolific composer Oscar was,” Kelly says. Since Peterson himself wasn’t able to play all of the music he composed, she has over the years enlisted others to give it life — most notably on the 2015 album “Oscar, With Love.” Everyone who participated played on Peterson’s 97-key Bösendorfer Imperial that he bought in 1981 and which remained in the Petersons’s home until 2015.

The first time Kelly approached John Clayton, a longtime friend to her and Oscar, about arranging and completing Africa Suite for performance was in 2012. It took another six or seven years to get the ball rolling and was more difficult than either of them had imagined. Its world premiere in Toronto happened right under the wire, only a month before COVID-19 shuttered concerts and other public gatherings across the globe. Another four years would pass before the suite’s U.S. premiere in San Francisco, on June 12, 2024.

While preserving and promoting her husband’s musical legacy is Kelly’s overarching goal, she also wants people to learn more about the man behind the genius. For one thing, she says, “Oscar was joy.” In light of that, she hopes audiences continue to feel the joy in his music and “the exuberance with which he played, which was also how he lived.”

In part because it might inspire others to endure their own personal challenges, she also wants to increase awareness of the preternatural dedication and determination that pushed Peterson to continue composing and performing (though his time on the road gradually decreased) after he suffered a stroke in 1993. Although it diminished the power of what Kelly has called “his speedy left hand,” he refused to shrink from his calling.

“By April 1994, he is tentatively ready to perform again, and we go to NYC, where he records an album with Itzhak Perlman — an album they had been planning just before the stroke,” she wrote in her liner notes to “City Lights: The Oscar Peterson Quartet — Live in Munich, 1994.” “This is the confirmation Oscar needed that he is indeed ready. Two months later, on July 1, 1994, Oscar walks onto the stage at the Vienna Staatsoper to a nearly 10-minute ovation from the audience, so thrilled are they to once again be at an Oscar Peterson concert, and so triumphant is he to be performing again.”

At a certain point, Peterson could easily have coasted on his talent and fame. But that kind of artistic complacency was anathema to him, and so he drove himself to constantly improve — to make each composition and performance better than the last one while remaining open to new sounds and new ideas — all the way until a year before his death in 2007.

“He was always learning and always trying things,” Kelly says. “From the time synthesizers came into the world, he was fascinated with using them and learning the sounds that were available to him, and that influenced his composing. I think that’s an important thing for people to know and to think about.

“You always do your best, and then you keep trying to make your best better.”