BIOGRAPHY
Born and raised in Ottawa, Peter has been a mainstay of the jazz community of Canada's capital for more than three decades.
Peter will be releasing Steps To Redemption, his fourth album as a leader, in June 2026. Supported by a grant from the City of Ottawa, the album features a stellar group of peers including Kenji Omae (tenor saxophone, Halifax, NS), David Smith (trumpet, Brooklyn, USA), Ted Quinlan (guitar, Toronto), Alec Walkington (bass, Montreal) and Ted Warren (drums, Guelph, ON). The sextet will celebrate the release of Steps To Redemption with performances in mid-June 2026 at Diese Onze in Montreal (June 19), the Ottawa Jazz Festival (June 20) and The Rex Jazz Blues Bar in Toronto (June 22).
Peter maintains a busy performing schedule and in recent years he has played for audiences in not only Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto but also Charlottetown, Antigonish, Kitchener and Vancouver. In the Ottawa area, he regularly performs at Robo Lounge, Night Oat and the Wakefield Mill.
Peter's 2020 recording, Ordinary Heroes, a collection of 10 compositions that brought Peter's social and political concerns to the forefront, was released in 2020 thanks to grants from the Ontario Arts Council and City of Ottawa. Among the acclaim that the album received was a four-star review in DownBeat magazine.
Previously, Peter released his second album, Alpha Moment in 2015, and his debut recording, A Boy's Journey, in 2010.
Largely self-taught, Peter was bitten by the jazz bug when he was a teenager in the 1970s, exposed to the music of Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. He counts himself very fortunate to have performed with such Canadian jazz legends as Sonny Greenwich, Phil Nimmons, Pat LaBarbera and Reg Schwager. Over the years, Peter's own projects have included such esteemed colleagues as the saxophonists Kenji Omae, Joel Miller, Frank Lozano and Mike Allen, guitarists Ted Quinlan, Mike Rud and Roddy Ellias, and drummers Ted Warren, Dave Laing, Dave Robbins and Andre White.
In Montreal during the last half of the 1980s, Peter performed weekly at the first incarnation of the city's famed Upstairs jazz club. Peter counts such accomplished artists as Steve Amirault, John Stetch, Denzal Sinclaire, Mike Allen, Dave Robbins, Alec Walkington and Ted Warren as friends from his Montreal days. While working toward his Master's Degree in English at McGill University, Peter led a jazz sextet that won the Lowenbrau Jazz Search in 1986 and represented Quebec at the Montreal International Jazz Festival's Alcan Jazz Competition in 1987.
In the early 1980s, while he studied English at Queen's University, Peter benefited greatly jazz-wise from extracurricular time spent with the great drum teacher Chris McCann.
Outside of music, Peter has been a journalist at the Ottawa Citizen since 1990, and has covered the education, crime, city hall, courts and technology beats. He has also reported for the newspaper from Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Hanover and Eastern Slovakia. He is currently the Citizen's restaurant critic.
Main page photo by John Fowler, inset photo by Bruno Schlumberger