Many of the jazz greats are dead. “All this weighs heavily on Canada’s jazz colossus Oscar Peterson, who will celebrate his 78th birthday on Friday. He’s been an international star for more than half a century, the work of his trios and quartets a grail for jazzers to pursue. The deaths of the jazz greats he moved with colours his views of today’s music. Peterson is from the golden age of jazz, when swing and bebop and the territory in between that he ploughs with such dazzling dexterity spawned hordes of mighty players whose genius is apparent even to contemporary listeners under assault from the forces of musical dreck.”