Keith Jarrett Trio Showsthe Power of Distillation

Listening to the Keith Jarrett Trio (with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette) Sunday night at Royce Hall, a thought kept recurring: “If it’s this easy to play this well, why can’t more players do it?”

The answer, of course, is that it isn’t easy at all.

What pianist Jarrett offers is the distillation of an astonishing amount of talent, will and sheer creativity. And it was not surprising to note that seated within a few rows of one another was a stellar array of Los Angeles jazz pianists--including Billy Childs, Les McCann, Alan Pasqua, Michael Lang and Tamir Hendelman--no doubt eager to take a closer look at that process of distillation.

What they saw and heard was a remarkable evening of improvisation. Although the Jarrett Trio has recently engaged in freestyle playing, in this case the performance was dedicated to the familiar (and some not-so-familiar) standards that have been the group’s stock in trade for more than a decade.

Typically, Jarrett concentrated on the music, offering only a few comments at one point, thanking the audience for coming out to embrace creativity during a time of so much destruction. Beyond that, it was two sets of consistently high-level playing, exploring numbers such as “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Yesterdays,” “I’m Going to Laugh You Right Out of My Life” and “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” adding a spirited romp through “Sandu,” a tune long associated with Clifford Brown, and adding a samba-tinged reinvention of “Out of Nowhere.”

Jarrett’s playing seemed more galvanized than in his last Southland appearance, and in an up-tempo dash through “There Will Never Be Another You,” he generated a series of choruses, winding up with a brilliant, nonstop run through the last 16 bars that was simply astounding.

Essential to his art is the capacity to use the harmonic schemes of songs in an inherently dramatic fashion, ebbing and flowing with his lines, building to climaxes, backing off suddenly into unexpected pauses. The result was a nearly constant involvement on the part of the audience, who reacted to what was essentially a series of complex improvisations with the same kind of enthusiasm that generally takes place at pop concerts.

Peacock and DeJohnette were, as usual, superb musical companions, responding with the sort of symbiotic connectivity that only comes from a constant musical association between gifted artists. Like Jarrett, they made it all appear easy--an especially rewarding experience at a time when almost everything else seems so hard.