In 1949, Norman Granz heard a live piano broadcast in a Montreal taxi and told the driver to turn around. This episode traces Oscar Peterson from the Little Burgundy neighborhood, where his railway porter father required his children to learn music, through the childhood tuberculosis that ended his trumpet playing, four to six hours of daily practice, and classical study with Paul de Marky in a lineage reaching back to Franz Liszt.

We look at the Art Tatum record that made a teenage Peterson quit playing for weeks, the fusion of Bach-trained finger independence with boogie-woogie, the CBC competition win at 14, and the Carnegie Hall debut with Jazz at the Philharmonic. Then come the Jim Crow tours where Granz stood down an armed policeman over a taxi, the drumless trio with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis, the 1970s group with Joe Pass and Niels-H ...