JAZZ REVIEW : Shirley Horn Dazzles Cinegrill Audience

Shirley Horn has the remarkable ability to make a large concert hall feel like a small nightclub. So what happened Tuesday evening, when she opened a five-night run at the Hollywood Roosevelt Cinegrill, a venue in which every seat is no more than 50 feet or so from the stage?

Instant intimacy, and then some. From her first, shimmering note, Horn transported her audience into the music, sometimes with an intensity that was almost painful, at other times with a sheer buoyant energy that had the jam-packed room grooving in unison.

There was nothing especially unusual about her selection of tunes. Horn has been working songs such as “How Am I to Know,” “All My Tomorrows” and “All Through the Night” for a long time. Yet each interpretation was a new discovery, radiant with emotional honesty and creative clarity.

Her ability to hover her lyrics above the musical flow, to layer her phrases with multi-levels of harmony, to generate great, whirling zephyrs of rhythm are without question. But beyond the technical skills that are implicit in such feats lies a capacity to urge both song and listener into the innermost arenas of feeling.

In that sense, Horn’s darker numbers were the ultimate expression of the late-night demons that travel the bars and bistros and cabarets of the world. Her reading of a piece such as “If You Go,” for example, was incredibly gripping, taking hold of her rapt audience and suspending it over the abyss of their own interior emotions.

Then, just when darkness seemed about to prevail, she turned to her version of the fast-becoming-a-classic “Here’s to Life” and brought a small, insistent ray of optimistic light to the infinitely varied grays and browns and blacks of her other interpretations. It was a stunning illustration of a master artist at the peak of her powers.

It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams to the Horn sound. Working with boundless subtlety, following her every spontaneous twist and turn, they were the ideal accompanists for a performer who clearly will tolerate nothing less than perfection.

* Shirley Horn at the Cinegrill in the Radisson Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd. (213) 466-7000. $18 tonight; $22 Friday and Saturday, with two-drink minimum. Horn performs through Saturday. Shows at 8 p.m., with an additional late show at 10:30 on Friday.