Photo: Tom Marcello Webster, New York, USA via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Oscar Peterson
Musician — 8 Grammy Awards, 200+ recordings, 'Maharaja of the keyboard'
Canadianness Score
Designation
Bleeds Maple Syrup 🍁Born, raised, and still says “out for a rip” unironically.
Scorecard
Path A — born on Canadian soilFun fact
At just fourteen, he won a national music competition run by the CBC — the first sign the kid practicing scales six hours a day in Little Burgundy was going somewhere.
The verdict
Born and raised in Montreal's Little Burgundy neighbourhood, this jazz legend put Canada on the map in a genre dominated by Americans. Taught piano by his railway-porter father and later trained under Hungarian classical pianist Paul de Marky, he became one of the most recorded pianists in history while never forgetting his roots — he'd return home between world tours and always identified as a proud Montrealer.
