JAZZ REVIEW : Kellaway’s Way at Le Cafe

Fortunately for a local gathering of admirers, Roger Kellaway decided to celebrate his 50th birthday Wednesday (with a follow-up Thursday) at Le Cafe in Sherman Oaks. It was a double celebration, since his drummer, John Guerin, had reached the big Five-0 on Tuesday.

Kellaway belongs to a rare breed of piano virtuosi who can be said to defy classification. He blends the lyricism of a Bill Evans with the energy of McCoy Tyner. He may open unaccompanied with a series of chordal speculations, then ease unpredictably into some familiar song--”Just Friends” or “If I Were a Bell”--to which he will bring, at various points, sumptuous harmonic ideas, coruscating cascades of two-handed runs and crashing dissonances.

Chasing down more stylistic avenues than a rainbow has hues, he may reach the end of the last chorus, then keep going with a series of hard-cooking tags, like a letter with a hundred postscripts. At all times he is sensitively followed by Guerin and by his longtime bassist Chuck Domanico.

Kellaway’s way with the blues was twice demonstrated. The contrast between “Blue Monk” and “All Blues” was striking, since the former is your basic, melodically jejune blues tune, yet he was able to bring everything to it from atonality to deep indigo funk, whereas “All Blues” is an inherently fascinating Miles Davis masterpiece on which the trio elaborated, doubling and halving the tempo, building the tension while Domanico’s ecstatic expression underlined the mutual jubilation.

That Kellaway is a gifted composer was illustrated in “Love of My Life,” which he recorded recently with Yo-Yo Ma. That he works no less compellingly unaccompanied was shown in his solo version of the 60-year-old “I’ll Never Be the Same,” to which he brought his personally graceful touch. Here as everywhere, he demonstrated that for him improvisation is not only the art of creation, but the art of sublimation. Roger Kellaway is an authentic 20th Century genius.