Billboard : 07/08/1957
Score of 81

One of the best Peterson sets in a long while, with the buoyant pianist framed by Ray Brown on bass and Herb Ellis on guitar in “concert.” A loose, relaxed feeling pervades, with subtle ensemble changes giving way to moments of emphatic solos. Flamingo has an almost funky atmosphere, and Falling in Love With Love is another demo gem.

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Cashbox : 07/13/1957

These performances by Peterson and the smart support of Herb Ellis (guitar) and Ray Brown (bass) at the Festival last year offer the jazz coterie beautifully intimate inventions, ones that stand out for their individuality, and freedom of approach. Jazz work of a high order.

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Army Times
Tom Scanlan : 07/06/1957

It has often been said that you can’t really appreciate the Oscar Peterson Trio until you have heard the group in person because the kind of jazz excitement that this unit is capable of just can’t be drummed up in a recording studio, where the Trio’s work too often lacks the enormous rhythmic drive that makes the unit one of the finest jazz combos in the world.

Having heard the Peterson Trio in person many times, I go along with this theory. Perhaps this is one reason why the Trio’s newest LP, recorded in front of a live audience, strikes me as something special despite the annoying grunting and groaning of its leader who should try to break this habit of spluttering beep-beeps in unison with his piano solos.

The set was recorded during the group’s performance at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival last year. Gypsy In My Soul is especialy recommended to illustrate just how much this group can get with it in front of a live audience.

In addition to Peterson’s so-swinging piano (marred, however, by that spluttering) Ray Brown‘s magnificent bass playing is reason enough to hear this record. There are also some fine guitar solos by Herb Ellis, despite what comes over, recording wise, as a tinny-sounding amp.

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Kansas City Call
Albert Anderson : 07/19/1957

Verve records, ever faithful to this corner record-wise, thought Oscar Pterson would be nice to record and consequently came up with something named The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival (what a title).

This set soars, with brisk and temperate creations by Peterson on piano, Ray Brown on bass and Herb Ellis on guitar. Peterson’s frame of mind puts the piano to the test throughout the track excluding the interruptions of Ellis whose vivid and exciting guitar genius adds high jazz luster to the session.

Ray Brown, in a warm atmosphere, glides effervescently over the bass strands as the three men display the acme of individuality in the opus. Jazz notables of the highest degree, Peterson, Ellis and Brown sensitively wade through the track each pressing the attack in an intriguingly virile modern jazz idiom.

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Oshkosh Northwestern
Chicago (United Press) – 07/22/1957
Jazz Class is Probably First of Kind

A studious little group at the YMCA is dissecting jazz.

The course taught by Don Young, public relations man for a meat packing company, probably is the first of its kind.

It features guest appearances by noted jazzmen and field trips to jazz emporiums like the Blue Note and Jazz Limited.

What sort of people attend an adult education class in jazz? Mostly smartly dressed young women in their 20s or early 30s, and a few young men with perfectly normal haircuts.

There’s one very chic grandmother in the bunch, Mrs. Marian Zimmerman, who gave her age as 21 plus. She said she was there to “have fun and learn something.”

The classroom has no blackboard, but it has a fancy record player and an upright piano.

The guest artist was jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, a thoughtful, pipe-smoking man who uses words like “polytonal.”

Jazz Coming Back

On the piano keyboard, Peterson traced the evolution of jazz piano from Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and Art Tatum to the present “modernists.”

The oldtimers used a “stride” left hand, Peterson explained, from which boogie woogie and countless variations evolved. The modernists, he complained, don’t use much left hand at all.

“The piano is a two-handed instrument,” Peterson said.

A blond young woman wanted to know where jazz is going.

“It’s going back,” Peterson asserted. “Progressive music has gone too far. For a while, they were even applying mathematical formulae to it. And if it’s mathematics, it isn’t music.

“Jazz is a swinging thing. It must have a foot-tapping feeling.”

Calls it “Funny Music”

Bill Spanier, a white-haired stockbroker in a conservative blue suit, shared the podium with Peterson. Spanier is the brother of Muggsy, the jazz cornetist.

Spanier agreed with Peterson about progressive jazz, which he calls “funny music.”

“The guys who play it wear goatees and berets in the hope somebody will look at them even if nobody will listen to what they play,” Spanier said.

But he couldn’t go along with Peterson that a jazz musician must have theoretical knowledge and be able to read music.

“Up until five years ago my brother couldn’t read a note,” he said. “And neither could most of the jazz greats who brought the music up from New Orleans.”

Spanier opined that you can get too analytical. He recalled that somebody once asked Louis Armstrong for a definition of jazz.

“Man, if you have to ask you’ll never know,” Satchmo replied.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 06/25/1957
3 Hearts That Beat As One in 4/4 Time

The Oscar Peterson Trio is one of the best jazz groups in the country and – as a trio – quite possibly the best. It is unusual when a group gets to a point of musical perfection where each member sublimates himself for the good of the unit and where the clash of ego that is inevitable in jazz – or any other art – is at a minimum.

That’s one of the great things about the Peterson Trio – it’s a unit. A particularly delightful one, too, with an amazing beat, some highly intricate and impressive interplay between the guitar of Herb Ellis and the bass of Ray Brown and the piano of Peterson himself.

Peterson has been one of the most recorded artists in jazz, appearing on countless Clef, Norgran and Verve sessions. He has made so many albums under his own name that it must be a problem now to know what to record next. But most of the time he doesn’t come through on records the way he does in person. There was a bit on a concert LP some time ago – Tenderly – which was great and there have been one or two others. but the sound of the Peterson Trio as we have heard it in the Blackhawk, for instance, has not been captured on recordings.

Until now, that is. For the past couple of days I have been rocking the walls of my house with a wonderful new Verve LP called The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. It was recorded at a concert there last year, under the personal supervision of John Lewis, of the Modern Jazz Quartet, a situation that should be encouraged.

The Trio plays nine numbers. But it is the quality, not the quantity of the music that shows the superiority of this disc over his previous efforts. At a club like the Blackhawk the Peterson group can get a rhythmic pulse cooking on any kind of tune in which the beat becomes so tantalizing that it is almost unbearable. It is one of the great kicks in modern jazz to catch the Trio at a moment like this. And the blessing of this LP is that several such moments have been caught.

There is, in addition to the group excitement, some great individual bass work by Ray Brown and a lovely version of Flamingo, featuring the piano, which has some exceedingly graceful harmonic developments. But the piece de resistance is the group effort on How High the Moon and on Duke Ellington‘s wonderful old tune, Love You Madly.

Don’t miss this album no matter what kind of jazz you like. It’s a delight.

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Saturday Review
Martin Williams : 08/17/1957

Peterson is apparently abandoning his earlier linear approach for chord-built solos, but his playing may still remind one of a brilliantly articulate anthology of ever lick, riff, and run that has been made in jazz from Joplin through Parker. This set has a spontaneity which the trio doesn’t often get in a studio, and contains a How High the Moon which is delightfully transformed into one of the most earthy blues since Speckle Red was recording.

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Charles Menees : 07/21/1957

The Oscar Peterson Trio performs even beyond expectations in a set of excerpts from a concert given last year at the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespearean Festival. Pianist Peterson, guitarist Herb Ellis and bassist Ray Brown alternate between swinging cohesively, plumbing a low-down blues feeling and working in striking harmonic patterns. Pianist-composer-arranger John Lewis, guiding light of the Modern Jazz Quartet, personally supervised the recording and left an unmistakable imprint on the splendid results. The tunes range from How High the Moon to Flamingo, from Love You Madly to a Peterson original, Noreen’s Nocturne.

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Down Beat : 07/25/1957
Ralph J. Gleason : 5 stars

Almost as if in answer to the discussion in the June 27 issue between Balliet, Ertegun, and Feather, comes this extraordinary album which presents for the first time the Peterson trio in the magnificent unit sound it gets in person.

Throughout this album you will find the particular kind of down-home, funky swinging which characterizes the type of jazz more directly linked to the basic roots of the music. Wherever you find it, you will also find that the trio has, whether or not the tune in question is a blues, given it a blues feel. For, in the final analysis, to play funky is to play with a blues feeling, a low down blues feeling (“how low and how wicked,” as Bunk Johnson said) and you can do this with Cole Porter as well as with Memphis Slim by evoking the mood, feeling, and the sound with “blue” chords and notes. This is the folk link that Duke and Basie and the MJQ and others all exploit.

That the Peterson trio is one of the best musical units in jazz has been accepted in most quarters for some time now. Until the appearance of this album, however, it has not been too easily demonstrated on disc. Here for the first time we have the boiling, bubbling, swinging beat that the group specializes in brought through onto disc. How High and Gypsy, as well as the wonderful Love You Madly, are perfect examples. In Flamingo, it’s the development of harmony that’s striking, but in the other it’s the back to the farm swing that’s a complete gas.

The album, by the way, was recorded under the personal supervision of John Lewis. That’s right. There should be more like this.

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Liner Notes by Oscar Peterson

Throughout the flow of the various albums that the Trio has completed, many critics and listeners have remarked that the feeling and swinging qualities of our group seldom have been captured on records. They also felt that the delicate and communicative rapport that they sense on our in-person appearances was usually lost in the mechanical and cold confines of a recording studio. I am inclined to agree to the extent that our group performs much better, speaking in a sensitive vain, in places, and under circumstances in which a live audience is involved. It is for this reason that I honestly believe that this recording of the Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival is our best to date.

Relatively speaking, everything was in our favor. First and foremost, the Trio was given two nights (which we shared with the Modern Jazz Quartet), in which to display a cross section of our musical wares. Secondly, the audiences both nights, were not only appreciative, but also cooperative, in that they not only were quiet throughout, but withheld their applause until the end of each solo or number, with the exception of places where they seemed moved to the point where they felt obligated to applaud (i.e. Love You Madly). This type of genuine and spontaneous appreciation served only to inspire and encourage our efforts, and in no way hindered us. Thirdly, we were aided by a very helpful John Lewis of the MJQ who lent the engineer a hand in the control room in the monitoring of the Trio. Knowing most of our arrangements from past dual appearances of the two groups, John was able to foresee well in advance, any change in the balance structure of the group.

As to the tunes, they were chosen as showcases for the various instrumental combinations, and individual soloists within the group. For instance, Noreen’s Nocturne, (written for Noreen Nimmons, wife of Phil Nimmons, jazz clarinetist and arranger in Toronto, Canada), displays the three-way melodic independence of each instrument on the opening chorus; an approach we often use to change the balance of the Trio sound-wise. Then there is the shouting type arrangement such as Love You Madly, which builds from a quiet ensemble to questions and answers between the bass and piano, and is climaxed at its peak by an old-time style two handed piano roll which resolves back to the original melody.

There is also a quiet version of Duke Ellington‘s Flamingo built completely of key changes, and interchangeable voices carrying the melody. How High the Moon is a frame for the solo bass work of the talented Ray Brown who threads his way thoughtfully and in excellent taste through a solo that lasts for two choruses. Then there is the by-play on 52nd Street Theme, which is treated as a roundelay with each instrument stepping on the last words of the preceding instrument’s sentence. Herb Ellis demonstrates on this tune that he is not only a talented soloist, but that he has complete control of his instrument along with a capacity for invention at all tempos (including this stratospheric one!)

As for myself, I have never felt more relaxed, and at ease at a recording session as I have at this one, and I feel that it shows in my playing. I hope that on hearing this album, the listeners agree with me.