I’m just a listener, but the difference is someone who can play all the notes correctly with someone who can make the harmonics sound like fairies singing accompaniment.
Wow - Peterson just eats his lunch, doesn’t he? Emerson has technique but I want to listen to Oscar. At about 1:20 in, Emerson is tossing off triplets and other fast techniques and sounds great - but at 2:00, Peterson takes over and his tone and melodic playfulness seems…well, just better all around to my ear.
**Eonwe **- thanks for that; your concept of a technique curve intersecting with a groove/feel curve makes sense. Emerson has great technique and a decent feel; Peterson has great technique and a superlative feel.
And look at them as they play - Emerson is working to sound as good as he can, whereas Oscar is just enjoying himself. The boogie pattern Oscar picks - walking octaves - is harder, but he doesn’t show it.
I also think it was very classy of Oscar to hold back a bit - I don’t know who was the guest of whom. Here’s what Oscar’s like when he really works up a sweat. (Note the walking octaves at about 2:12) Lord, I miss Oscar Peterson!
To be totally fair to Emerson, he was playing outside of his specialty. I don’t know how Oscar Peterson would have done sticking knives in the organ keys and kicking it over while soloing on a Moog… (but I bet he’d have found something fun and cool to do!)
My ex-wife was a good piano player–she had passed a few piano grade levels in France, I can’t remember which ones–who had a friend who was a professional piano player. Her analysis was fairly similar to Le Ministre de l’au-delà’s, but I think she said it more succinctly: “I’m trying to hit the right keys, but my friend plays the right keys.”
Yeah, I’ve seen that clip before. It really shows the difference between somebody playing in a heavy-handed rock style versus a more nuanced and lyrical jazz style. What Keith Emerson plays in that piece–I can more-or-less do. It’s not at all that difficult, just running through a lot of standard blues honky-tonk riffs. But it sounds heavy and ham-fisted to me, and (if I’m brutally honest with myself) that’s a lot of what my piano playing sounds like, and that’s what I dislike about my own playing. When Oscar hits the solo, there’s a real swing to it, the solo is playful, inventive, and lyrical. It sounds like a real solo, not just going through the motions of stacking riff after riff on top of each other. Put it this way: I’m way out of practice and shape, and I feel I could learn the Keith Emerson solo and make it sound reasonably similar to what you hear on that recording. I feel I can never ever possibly touch Oscar’s solo and make it swing like that, even if I dedicated my entire life just to learning that one solo.
Haha. I can’t view youtube here at work, but I had a suspicion that the video was the Emerson/Peterson one.
FWIW, Emerson has said in interviews that he was pretty awed and stressed out to be trading licks with Peterson, and as you say, he was out of his element and his genre.
I’m a big fan of both of those guys, and Emerson has his superlative moments for sure, but Peterson is in a class like few others. The greatest of the great.
I should add, Keith Emerson is a very good, perhaps a great keyboardist/synth player in his genre. However, playing on organs and synthesizers for so long (with keys that are not touch sensitive), I think one must lose a bit of the sense of dynamics that is important when playing the piano, and, combined with the more “rock band playing jazz” feel of the rhythm section, it particularly shows in that piece.
Fascinating comment; jumps out now that you state it.
Question: have you heard much Red Garland? He’s probably my favorite jazz pianist - Live at the Prelude Volume 1 just blows me away. But he plays these big blocky chords (and switches to light-as-air lyrical triplets which can go on forever).
I know I hear a difference between Emerson’s style and a “big-blocky chord” style of a jazz player like Garland, but I’ll be darned if I know how to articulate the difference…
Reminds me of “Deliverance”, where Ronny Cox is working hard while the savant is just playing in the “Dueling Banjos” scene.
Joe
I’ve been pondering this for a couple of days now - it’s a fascinating question, and I doubt I’ll do it justice. Most of what follows is simply my opinion or my experience, so keep the salt shaker handy…
The first big difference is in the hands - a guitarist needs stretch in the fretting hand between the index and pinky fingers. He may not be used to stretching the fingering hand at all, and the fretting thumb spends its life on the other side of the neck. On piano, you either stretch your hands or you make up for it by rolling (or breaking, arpeggiating, etc. - the idea is the the same. Instead of playing all the notes of a chord simultaneously, you play them one at a time in quick succession. I have a friend, a professional accompanist, who can barely stretch an octave. Anything else gets broken - she has practiced to the point where the brokenness of the chord is imperceptible. She’s a great inspiration to me…). The compositions for the instrument, however, are constantly demanding that stretch. It has been hard to get used to the requirements of both instruments…
The wrists function in a completely different manner. On guitar, I train to keep the wrists straight and strong so that the carpal tunnel is not cramped. (That can lead to real problems!!) On piano, the wrists must be flexible and fluid, and are in constant motion. For piano, the division of labour works this way - the fingers are responsible for getting to the right key in time; the wrists are responsible for providing the weight which depresses the keys, for providing the tone quality of each note/chord and for creating the simultaneity of notes which are played together. (i e you have five fingers on each hand but only one wrist, so if the wrist pulls the trigger, the chord is together. If the fingers pull the triggers, the chord will not necessarily be simultaneous and the fingers will get tired because they’re working too hard.)
I find the guitar has a much greater variation of tone available than the piano, whereas the piano has a much greater variation of dynamics available. Because of that, I have to work harder on guitar to create a greater dynamic range, and harder to control the tonal palette. On piano, it’s the opposite - I have to work hard to create the tonal range, and work hard to control the dynamic range.
Pedaling was really hard to get used to - your foot is moving in a different rhythm than your hands, and you need a lot of control so that you don’t a) slam the pedal all the way to the bottom giving an offbeat kick drum that makes all the strings resonate nor b) release the pedal so that it thumps at the top. ‘Stealth pedaling’ is the goal, or as a friend of mine says ‘Pedal like a ninja’.
The musical demands are very different as well. On guitar, I don’t work on scales very much as guitar composers don’t use them that often. On piano, it would seem that the entire Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven repertoire consists of nothing but scales.
Transcribing piano music for guitar has made me realize that what is a simple accompaniment on the piano can be brutally difficult on the guitar. One of the best contrapuntal pieces in the guitar’s repertoire, the Fernando Sor study in C major, Op. 6, #8, takes a lot of care and practice to play well on the guitar. (And here you can hear the difference between a good guitarist and a much better guitarist.) Difficult contrapuntal music on the piano would be best transcribed for guitar trio, quartet or quintet.
On both instruments, the key to developing technique is practice, and slowly confronting your own limitations. I find guitar has been easier, but I also started working on guitar when I was thirteen. Piano, I started when I was 41, and that alone makes it more difficult to acquire proficiency.
And I have to leave it at that…
A real difference between great blues/jazz/gospel pianists is the ability to create and maintain high energy in their performances. Listen to Billy Preston on any given YouTube clip and there’s an excellent example.
I agree with what someone said above about creating a groove – without rhythmic control and precision, especially in improvised music, there’s no point in worrying about legato lines or whatever. A bad pianist who works with a combo is someone who depends on the bass and/or the drums to set the rhythm, when it’s actually everyone’s job to keep their own time straight and logical, or however you want to put it.
Beyond that, melody – a good player to me is someone who has the groove and can also and perhaps above all else make the melody sing out, straight from the ear to the hands. Lots of ways to make it happen technically, but it absolutely has to sound good, and sound intentionally done, and make sense to the ear of the listener.
Le Ministre - I’ve never heard that “wrist pulls the trigger” explanation before, but it makes sense as I think it out - thank you.
No idea what to make of the comments on contrapuntalism - is it: the piano can maintain more separate voices vs. a guitar? What is the gap that would translate a complex contrapuntal piano piece into 3 - 4 guitars?
I tend to think of the piano as digital and the guitar as analog: the piano has specific black-or-white 
tones and chord forms; guitars have “digital” frets but with multiple voicings, bends, whammy’s, effects, etc - can move across the gamut of notes in an analog, continuous fashion…
at least you’ve got frets. unlike the other stringed instruments.
Hmm, I’ll have to keep this in mind the next time I practice and see if it helps with my chord playing! 
Digital vs analog thinking is another hurdle in the race to ‘greatness’.
It’s very easy to think of piano keys as on/off, 1/0 type of controllers, but there is a lot more to it than that. It’s true that on the piano you have just one key per note, but you have control over volume, attack, resonance, and harmonics as well.
When you strike a piano key or chord, all the strings hum a bit. How you move from one to the next (especially the timing of releasing the pedal) defintiely “bends” the sound in one direction or the other. When you stop the vibration of each is key.
If you haven’t tried it already, play around with stabbing a chord, and then keeping certain keys pressed while releasing others and pedaling. Just play for an hour or so and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a bit like the way that one color can emphasize another when you are decorating. A pattern that doesn’t look red at all in front of an orange wall, will suddenly burn red in front of a white one. It’s like that. . .
Yep - I totally get that I am over-simplifying. I am seeing how that perspective fits within the context of the OP - how the “digital” layout of the keys influences the ability to nail a groove and/or otherwise separate a great player…
EVERYONE in my elementary school, kids and teachers, by around 3rd. grade or so, knew Kit was a genius.
A great one simply takes ownership of the instrument, without realizing other folks need to learn how to play.