Oscar Peterson, one of the great jazz musicians and among the most celebrated virtuoso pianists of all time, died on Sunday of kidney failure in Toronto. He was 82. In an interview with The New York Sun last year, the contemporary jazz pianist Bill Charlap described Oscar Peterson as “one of the most profoundly important pianists in the history of the music. He straddles the entire history of jazz piano. Everything everyone says is true!” Peterson’s praises were also sung by virtually every major pianist of the second half of the 20th century, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and André Previn.

For nearly 60 years in the world of jazz and pop music, the name Peterson was synonymous with a keyboard technique that was so prodigious it was nearly overwhelming: He played more notes than any other pianist, more intense chords, and faster rhythms, yet without ever descending into a quagmire of pure skill and speed. He also played with a supreme melodic logic: every one of the eighty-zillion notes he played in every song was saturated with both feeling and swing.

RELATED: Audio Clips at Oscarpeterson.com

As he said in a 2001 interview with radio host Michael Anthony of WHPC Long Island, “Swing is the root of jazz. If you can’t swing then you’re not playing jazz. That is the impetus that drives the whole medium and has driven it throughout all these years. Swing is the infectious part of [jazz], the emotional end of it. … If you don’t have the swing element, than you’re not operating in the jazz medium.”

Peterson, who was born in Montreal in 1925, was encouraged to play by his father, a sailor, and by his older brother, Fred, who began playing jazz piano at an early age. “He was just beginning to get into jazz,” Peterson later said. “It was different from the studies that I was doing. All I knew was that I wanted to play like that. Ironically, if he was living today [Fred died at 16 years old], I would NOT be playing jazz piano, because he was better than me.” Peterson earned his professional stripes with Toronto big band leader Johnny Holmes, and first recorded in that city in 1945. In 1949, he was invited by impresario Norman Granz to participate as a special guest at a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall. In Granz, Peterson found a manager and producer whose appetite was as capacious as the pianist’s talent was prodigious. From 1950 forward, Granz recorded Peterson continually, both in his own trios and duos and with all the best-known names in jazz.

Peterson said that the three pianists who influenced him most were Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and Nat King Cole. As he told Mr. Anthony, “I admired Teddy primarily for his beautiful touch on the instrument. Needless to say, he had a flawless technique. Art not only had great technique, but he was harmonically perfect. Nat Cole gave me the incentive to swing real hard.”

He also stated that the first time he heard Tatum play (on a recording) he was so overcome that he couldn’t bring himself to touch his piano for two months. Though he was often described as Tatum’s heir, as Mr. Charlap put it, “He assumed the mantle of Tatum, but Oscar doesn’t play Art’s stuff — it’s Oscar’s stuff.” In establishing his own style, Peterson became much more of a specialist in funky, church-influenced blues than Tatum was and also more of a balladeer.

Unlike Tatum, too, Peterson was a brilliant accompanist for singers and sideman for other leaders — and he continued to work in these capacities long after he had become one of the jazz world’s best-known superstars. He served as more or less a house pianist for several years at Verve, accompanying legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, while at the same time he toured jazz clubs continually with his first great trio, patterned after King Cole’s, with guitarists Barney Kessell or Irving Ashby (later Herb Ellis) and bassist Ray Brown.

In 1958, Peterson assembled a new trio with the then-standardized format of piano, bass (Ray Brown again), and drums (Ed Thigpen). It was with this trio that he recorded his most famous live session, an extensive series of tapes documenting Peterson and his trio at their finest, recorded over a week in 1961 at Chicago’s London House nightclub, which were released at the time on four LPs (one of which Diana Krall named as her all-time favorite album) and later gathered into a five-CD boxed set.

By the 1960s, Peterson was increasingly appearing in concert halls and garnering accolades, especially from his native Canada (although, remarkably, he was never named as an NEA Jazz Master), including 16 honorary doctorates and eight Grammy Awards, culminating in the NARAS Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. From the 1960s on, Peterson worked more frequently as a composer; his most ambitious work was the album-length “Canadiana Suite” of 1964, of which the most-performed movement was his “Hogtown Blues.” He also frequently played his own “Blues for Big Scotia,” another blues with a Canadian theme.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Peterson went beyond his famous trio to collaborate with such fellow jazz giants as Milt Jackson and Clark Terry, and also to make several albums with full orchestral accompaniment (one of which was arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle). At the opposite end of the spectrum, he recorded a brilliant series of solo albums in Germany in 1970.

Peterson was slowed down considerably by a stroke in 1993, and, although he eventually went back to work, he never completely recovered the remarkably proficiently he had earlier. Even so, as this newspaper noted when Peterson made what would be his final appearance in New York, at Birdland in August 2006, “even today at 81, Oscar Peterson plays more piano than any three other great pianists put together.”

Oscar Peterson

Survived by his wife, Kelly, daughter, Celine, and six children from three previous marriages: Lyn, Sharon, Gay, Oscar Jr., Norman, and Joel.