Legend keeps it simple

As the road crew finished preparing the stage for John Legend’s show at the Wiltern LG on Thursday, a stagehand wiped the grand piano with a towel, and then a colleague sprayed the instrument with furniture polish and rubbed it to a burnished glow.

Only later did the reason for the housekeeping become evident. As Legend sang, the spotlight reflected off the top of the piano and formed two shapes of light on the rear curtain, sometimes incorporating his silhouette as he paced the front of the stage.

That was the only decorative embellishment in the singer’s unfashionably unflashy concert, a symbol of the meticulousness and restraint that define Legend’s appeal. Like the music on his two albums, the performance was direct, uncluttered and emotional.

It also was a slight letdown, given the Ohio native’s impressive career-opening salvo. His debut album, “Get Lifted,” came out at the end of 2004 and introduced a soul-music classicist with a line to Motown’s multicultural mandate, and a storyteller drawn to the riptides of commitment and unfaithfulness.

“Get Lifted,” anchored by its sweeping, vulnerable ballad “Ordinary People,” sold nearly 2 million copies and got Legend the best new artist Grammy, but as he feels his way upward as a concert headliner, this extraordinary writer and record maker seemed ordinary as a live performer.

Some artists blossom into charismatic figures on stage, but Legend suggested someone who’s been working hard to learn the steps and gestures expected of a contemporary R&B; act.

He and his band of five instrumentalists and three singers also let the sound go too loud, pushing his voice into a corner where it lost his distinctive phrasing and dynamics. On record he has an everyman voice, effortless, imperfect and relatable, but at the Wiltern he often just belted. It was like putting Baryshnikov in a box.

As an inward-looking artist rather than a crowd-connecting showman, he seemed more in his element when he sat at the piano, focusing his fire on songs whose musical form and lyrical content combine in highly original and provocative pop.

His new album, “Once Again,” is off to a relatively slow start, but its songs formed the bedrock of the 90-minute concert.

Legend still evokes soul legends, notably Motown’s triumvirate of Stevie, Marvin and Smokey, but he also has a pan-pop vision, with melodies that suggest Paul Simon and Elton John and a fondness for quirky features you can trace to Jimi Hendrix and Steely Dan.

Legend, who also plays the House of Blues in Anaheim on Tuesday, captured the no-nonsense seriousness underlying his pleas in “Save Room,” his current single, and had fun with “Stereo,” whose detailed observations and smart language elevate it from the usual encounter-with-a-groupie tale. In “PDA” he showed his exhibitionist side, suggesting play dates in the park, in a restaurant, in her mother’s house.

“Show Me,” a skeptical prayer directed at an elusive deity, was coupled with “Ordinary People” in one of the show’s strongest sequences. But the high point was “Again,” a free-tempo ballad about an illicit affair. Legend embodied the pain with dissonant, stabbing chords, and his voice rippled with anguish as he grappled with a relationship in which “accusations fly like bullets do.”

With songs like that, Legend doesn’t have to be a dance man too.

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richard.cromelin@latimes.com

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John Legend

Where: House of Blues Anaheim, 1530 S. Disneyland Drive, Anaheim

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Price: $35

Contact: (714) 778-2583