Catalina Treat: Two Young, Talented Trios for Price of One

It’s jazz twofer week at the Catalina Bar & Grill. In an attractive booking, the Hollywood jazz club is featuring organist Larry Goldings and pianist Brad Mehldau, both leading trios. Both groups are young and talented with enough ability, but not quite enough name recognition, to headline on their own.

Name recognition or not, the engagement affords an excellent opportunity to hear some extremely gifted young performers at an early stage in their careers.

The Goldings Trio--with Peter Bernstein on guitar and Bill Stewart on drums (all longtime associates)--worked with the smooth precision of a Swiss watch on Tuesday. But the crisp, almost intuitive connections between the three players in no way minimized the energy or the irresistible exhilaration of their music.

Goldings is a true jazz organist, not a converted pianist, and he played his Hammond C-3 with full control of its potential--bass lines across the foot-pedals, swelling crescendos and screaming, high register organ stops. Bernstein added bracing chordal accompaniment, interspersing it with fleet, single-string improvisations.

But the heart and soul of the Goldings trio rested in Stewart’s drumming. One of the most accurate percussionists in jazz, he also is a musician who does not hesitate to take chances. Some of his exchanges with the other players, for example, produced brief segments of rhythm so intricate that the music’s fundamental meter all but disappeared; yet it was always there, hidden within Stewart’s disjunct rhythmic vision.

The set from pianist Mehldau was more of a one-man show, with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jorge Rossi primarily offering dependable rhythm section backup.

Playing with an intent fixation upon the keyboard, head tilted forward at a perpendicular angle to his back, Mehldau’s introspective solos were beautifully harmonized, rhythmically compelling and assembled with compositional intelligence.

Like Bill Evans, an obvious model, both creatively and in the physical manner in which he approaches the piano, Mehldau worked from the innermost parts of the music. But, although he already is a very fine improviser, he has not yet managed to achieve Evans’ degree of success in transforming the interior emotions of his music into the exterior language of communication and interaction.

* The Larry Goldings Trio and the Brad Mehldau Trio at Catalina Bar & Grill through Sunday, 1640 N. Cahuenga Blvd., (213) 466-2210. $12 cover tonight and Sunday, $15 cover Friday and Saturday, with two-drink minimum. Two shows nightly, at 8:30 and 10:30.