Pleasantville native Ralph Peterson Jr., a jazz drummer, bandleader, composer and educator, died earlier this month in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, from complications from cancer, according to his official website. He had been living with the disease for the last six years. He was 58.
Peterson Jr. was the son of former Pleasantville Mayor Ralph Peterson Sr., a pioneer in the city, who died in 2014 at age 81. Peterson Sr. was the city’s first Black police chief in 1981 and its first Black mayor in 1992.
Peterson Jr. came up in a family of drummers, according to his official website. Peterson’s grandfather played drums and so did four of his uncles. He started on drums at age 3, but it was as a trumpeter that he made his way into the jazz studies program at Rutgers University.
Besides Peterson’s family, he was one in a line of famous South Jersey jazz drummers, including the late Chris Columbo of Atlantic City; Harvey Mason Sr., an Atlantic City native; Peter Erskine, a Somers Point native; and the late Art Blakey, who lived in Northfield for part of his life.
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Peterson was the anointed heir of Blakey, a hard-bop progenitor and drummer-bandleader of the Jazz Messengers, whose ranks produced several generations of major jazz talent.
One of the standout jazz musicians to emerge in the 1980s, Peterson was part of a striving peer group known as the Young Lions, who coalesced around the resurgence of acoustic hard bop. He distinguished himself early on as a powerful steward of that tradition.
“It’s music that revolves around richly ambiguous harmonies and shifty, mercurial melodies,” wrote Jon Pareles in 1990, reviewing a Peterson performance for The New York Times. “Difficult as it is to play, Mr. Peterson and his group rekindled the style’s sense of risk and triumph.”
Vincent Ector, a jazz percussion teacher in the Department of Music at Princeton University, Mercer County, said studying with Peterson gave him the chops to become part of the New York City jazz scene, where he lives to this day. Peterson led a group called Hip Pocket, where he played trumpet. Ector was the drummer for that group.
“Ralph really fine-tuned my playing,” said Ector, who played in the late 1980s at Harrah’s Resort in Atlantic City. “He really guided me. He was like the big brother I never had.”
Peterson taught at Rutgers before he started teaching at the Berklee College of Music in 2003 in Boston, where he was a professor. He had Ector substitute for him once or twice at Rutgers. Ector, who is also a recording artist, started teaching at Princeton eventually.
“Ralph was our benchmark as a drummer, bandleader, composer, educator and record-label owner,” Ector said.
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Yoron Israel, the chair of the percussion department at Berklee, was one of the people responsible for hiring Peterson in 2003.
He knew Peterson from the mid-1980s when they were involved with an early version of the Jazz for Teens program in Newark, Essex County.
“He touched so many students at Berklee and not in a superficial way, but in a deep way. They were like disciples of Ralph. They became very attached to him,” Israel said. “I have seen Ralph play. ... He was always finding spaces in the music that create excitement.”
Peterson was one of two drummers to perform with The Jazz Messengers, having been hand-picked by Blakey as the second drummer in the legendary bandleader’s Jazz Messenger Big Band, in which he served until Blakey’s death in 1990, according to jazziz.com.
As a sideman, Peterson’s resume included more than 150 albums with credits on albums by the late saxophonist Michael Brecker, the late trumpeter Roy Hargrove and former Messengers bandmates Terence Blanchard and Branford Marsalis. He also worked with Branford’s younger brother, Wynton Marsalis, with the Count Basie ghost band.
Besides Peterson’s work as a sideman, he released 23 albums as a leader from 1988 to 2019, including the music he issued on his own Onyx Productions Music Label starting in 2010.
One of Peterson’s projects as a co-leader was titled “Outer Reaches” with The Unity Project with Grammy-nominated jazz organist Pat Bianchi in 2010. Peterson was 48. Bianchi was 35.
“He embraced a lot of younger musicians and guided them,” said Bianchi, who is an associate professor at Berklee and teaches part time. “He was a mentor of mine. ... My office was a couple of doors from his.”
Bianchi played with Peterson at possibly his last indoor gig as they did an organ and drummer duo concert on March 17, and Berklee shut down two days later because of COVID-19, Bianchi said.
Playing with Peterson was like hopping on a train, and you just go, Bianchi said.
“You have to be strong as a musician yourself. He is not just a time keeper,” Bianchi said of Peterson’s performance style.
Michael Kline, the executive producer and artistic director of the Exit Zero Jazz Festival in Cape May, knew Peterson since the mid-1990s and booked Ralph Peterson and the Messenger Legacy for an indoor gig in November 2019. Peterson was also on drums when Kline booked pianist’s Orrin Evans’ Quintet for the outdoor version of the festival on Oct. 2.
Kline said he spoke to Peterson a month ago. He talked with Peterson about a big band recording he was about to start, and about having the group return this fall to the festival.
If the recording comes out, Kline said, he would like to do a tribute to Peterson during the fall version of the festival.
“I was always amazed how powerful a drummer he was. He used so many colors. What he was laying down underneath to support them (the group) was always at a different level,” Kline said.
Peterson is survived by his wife Linea, daughter Sonora Slocum, and stepdaughters, Saydee and Haylee McQuay, according to his website.
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