The pianist Gerald Clayton, in a set mixing originals and standards at the Jazz Gallery on Saturday.
The young pianist Gerald Clayton doesn’t play too long or too loud, except by precise strategy. He uses swing rhythm as a foursquare entity, rather than warping it or battling against it; he’s averse to dissonance except as tiny, unobtrusive details in a powerful euphony. He’s unusually presentable.
Mr. Clayton, 22, made a quick visit to New York over the weekend, playing Saturday night at the Jazz Gallery, with David Wong on bass and Pete Van Ostrand on drums. It was a secure set, mixing originals and standards and bringing in the trumpeter Roy Hargrove in its last third. As a measure of the consensus around Mr. Clayton, the house was packed even though he hasn’t made his own record.
The son of the jazz bassist John Clayton and lately a presence on Diana Krall’s records, Mr. Clayton comes from Los Angeles, where he studied at the University of Southern California. When he inevitably moves to New York, we’ll be hearing more about him. This isn’t a blind guess; there just aren’t a lot of pianists who have so much organized at such a young age. His style synthesizes economy, variety and harmonic ideas from players like Cedar Walton and Kenny Barron, as well as some flourishes and grandstanding energy from Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum. It’s also an armored style, with a decent amount of glibness and facile blues language; one that, for whatever reason, regards dissonance, abruptness and space as undesirable options.
Leaning toward theold school, Mr. Clayton may not have that undefinable elasticity, that ability to let go at the more abstract, higher level that a lot of serious pianists in his generation are developing. What he does have is control over technique and the arc of a performance, and those can be devastating strengths.
He didn’t get the most of Billy Strayhorn’s “Isfahan,” which he fussed over too much, burying a beautiful chord progression under piles of grace notes and decorous phrases. But he can swing at very fast tempos, and he can play quietly in a slow ballad and, even better, at medium tempo.
He did this in an original piece called “Two Heads, One Pillow.” It began cool and wary, with a bass ostinato echoed in the piano’s bass clef; after the theme, Mr. Clayton began his solo with hard, argumentative phrases, but his left hand, inside the piano, damped the strings, muffling the notes. By the time the piece ended, it had gone through three or four major dynamic surges, one of them using the momentum of Mr. Hargrove’s solo.
And when Mr. Clayton regained control in the last chorus, swinging quietly again, there was a sense that he was on to something. Listeners looked satisfied, as if they’d solved a puzzle or been let in on a secret.
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