OTTAWA

Duke Ellington once called Oscar Peterson “the maharajah of the keyboard.” And Wednesday is the day the Queen of Canada will pay her respects to the maharajah.

The official festivities, including a free concert as well as speeches, are set for 1 p.m., as a prelude to Canada Day, on a prime Ottawa corner, Albert St. at Elgin St., in front of the National Arts Centre. Thousands are expected to turn up for the unveiling of sculptor Ruth Abernethy’s warm and imaginative bronze salute of the great jazz pianist, who died at 82 in December 2007.

On Monday, I jumped the queue and got a glimpse of this key member of jazz history’s royal family, seated beside a wonderful fanciful and rounded grand piano, smiling at the audience with pleasure and relief at the end of a performance.

In order to do so, I had to climb a ladder to reach a vantage point above the sculpture, which has been hidden behind a wall to keep it a surprise until the moment of its unveiling.

That turned out to be a trek well worth taking.

This piano is like none you’ve ever seen, though it is based on Peterson’s favourite, an Austrian model with 97 keys instead of the usual 88 — and in that extra octave, keys that would normally be all white had black tops.

“From the beginning, the piano was a constant in Oscar Peterson’s life,” Abernethy told me afterward. “He was a man who asked to reimagine the piano. So I thought it was important to use it as a metaphor for his musical inventiveness.”

She had no interest, she confesses, in duplicating the real piano, which happens to be 275 centimetres long. That would have been tedious, expensive and excessively literal-minded. This is not for people who want to count the keys.

Instead, she wanted to create the illusion that we are seeing this image through a fish-eye camera lens, with the piano as a tongue-in-cheek enhancement.

The effect is not just enhancement but enchantment: a sense of an everlasting moment of joy as the jazz master smiles at the audience just after the music has stopped.

Like her Glenn Gould sculpture in front of the CBC’s Broadcast Centre in Toronto, this keyboard legend is on a bench with room for a passerby to sit down and join the icon for a duet. But unlike her Gould bronze, this Oscar does not project stony solitude; he welcomes company.

“Jazz is like seafood,” quips Abernethy: “the fresher the better.”

It’s a wonderful breakthrough that just steps from Parliament Hill an artist will forever loom, getting the kind of honour that the nation’s capital has more often reserved for politicians and military leaders.

Spearheaded by Peter Herrndorf, CEO of the National Arts Centre, who was also a guiding force for the 2008 memorial tribute concert to Peterson at Roy Thomson Hall, this project was completed through a successful $300,000 fundraising campaign.

Among the major donors were the Slaight Family Charitable Foundation, created by Standard Broadcasting pioneer and jazz fan Allan Slaight, Fred and Anne Ketchen of Mississauga, TD Bank Financial Group and Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion’s Foundation for Arts, Culture and Heritage.

Supporters also included former Ontario premier Bill Davis as well as two of the capital’s best-known current political leaders, Stephen Harper and Bob Rae, both of whom have played the piano at the National Arts Centre.

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Among those performing at Wednesday’s unveiling will be pianist Oliver Jones and the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir.

Meanwhile, by a wonderful coincidence, on the same day in Toronto, one of the world’s other great jazz pianists, Keith Jarrett, will play at the Four Seasons Centre as part of the TD Toronto Jazz Festival.

mknelman@thestar.ca