Pop and Jazz Reviews : Tori Amos’ Tender, Tortured Roxy Debut

Like an Olympic diver steadying herself alone on the platform, Tori Amos took two even breaths into the microphone at the piano and prepared to leap into a set of free-falling musical and emotional contortions on Monday at the Roxy.

For the next hour the enraptured audience sat breathless as it followed every intricate, practiced twist from the petite Amos as she played complex Kate Bush-Elton John-like piano and sang with psychodramatic dynamics that manifest a soul both tender and tortured.

Amos’ performance was tainted somewhat by the aura of a budding Important Artist at work, but she managed to walk that fine line between precious pretension and naked honesty in a manner that recalled forgotten tortured-soul Dory Previn as much as it did the more frequently mentioned Bush.

And by the time she broke the surface with the sexual assault account of “Me and a Gun,” her flighty voice accompanied only by the Roxy air conditioning, there was a sense that perhaps someday she will be an important artist. Especially if she keeps coming up for air with such inspired outside material choices as “Whole Lotta Love” (Led Zep via Chopin?) and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which, slowed to a simmering ballad, was even spookier and more troubled than Nirvana’s original.