The late, great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson was a master interpreter of the Great American Songbook. His stunning arrangements of jazz standards often dazzled with lightning-fast licks and hot tempos. However, probably his most enduring piece of music is an original composition that swings low and slow.
“Hymn to Freedom” began in the studio as a spontaneous composition for a jazz piano trio, but was soon adapted into a vocal version. Over the years, it has been reworked for various orchestrations, but it always comes back to the piano and Peterson’s inspired voice-leading.
Peterson wrote “Hymn to Freedom” in 1962 during the sessions for his album “Night Train,” on which it appears. The pianist was in the studio with his bandmates, Ray Brown on bass, and Ed Thigpen on drums, when producer Norman Granz urged him to write a song with a “definitive early-blues feel” to close the record.
“For inspiration, Peterson drew upon various church renderings of Negro spirituals recalled from his childhood in Montreal,” the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame explains. “He aimed to maintain the unadorned, yet poignant quality of these early Baptist hymns while composing the beginning chorus of ‘Hymn to Freedom.'”
Many jazz standards are built on a series of ii-V-I progressions that often lead us to new key centers. Spirituals, on the other hand, have a more basic chord structure that sticks to the I, IV, V, and vi of a single key center. However, gospel music gets its harmonic richness from passing chords, which are chords added before a main chord change to “create a greater sense of tension and resolution in the progression,” Piano Groove writes. “Passing chords in gospel music can be seen as ‘temporary stepping stones’ between the core chord changes 1, 4, and 5, and they are used to enhance and decorate the simple 145 gospel blues progression.”
In “Hymn to Freedom,” Peterson employs the technique from the very beginning of the song. Bar one begins on the tonic F chord, while bar two lands on the vi: Dmin. He puts an A chord in between, emphasizing its non-diatonic nature by putting the third of the chord in the bass. The C# acts as a leading tone to Dmin and draws our ear to the harmonic shift.
However, it was more than just spirituals that inspired the song. Peterson wrote “Hymn to Freedom” with “the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for liberty and justice in mind,” as Everything Jazz puts it. It’s his ode to the Civil Rights Movement, which may be why Peterson’s performances of the song resonate so deeply.
In this black-and-white footage from Denmark in 1964, Peterson channels the spirit of the times. He’s joined by Brown and Thigpen, who hold a rock steady groove as his signature flurry of notes conveys all the feelings of the moment.
Get the sheet music for “Hymn to Freedom” and join the ongoing chorus for justice:
