Further Adventures of Ahmad Jamal

The notion of a jazz artist as a stylist--as a performer with an immediately identifiable musical personality--hasn’t been particularly present in the art in recent decades. The quest for technical virtuosity, for retro visits to past eras, has tended to minimize the emergence of players with unique characteristics.

Many of those younger artists would do well to check out the approach favored by Ahmad Jamal. On Tuesday night at the Jazz Bakery, the veteran pianist once again offered a potent reminder of what the jazz world was like when such musicians as Erroll Garner, George Shearing, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins, among dozens of others, were on the scene. Stylists all, their primary goal was to follow the pathways opened by their individual Muses rather than replicate the work of others.

Jamal has been offering a unique musical vision since the ‘50s, his mastery of pacing and rhythm balanced by thunderous chording and slyly articulated melodies. It’s a formula that allows him complete freedom to explore his improvisational inventiveness while affording his listeners a referential framework that allows them to fully experience his most adventurous flights of fancy.

On Tuesday, accompanied by his regulars--bassist James Cammack, who has played bass with Jamal for nearly 20 years, and drummer James Johnson--he applied that formula to a program ranging from the standard “You Go to My Head” to his own “Kaleidoscope.” Each piece emerged as a complex amalgam of music and theater, of rhapsodic piano passages suddenly giving way to crisp drum accents and deep, fundamental bass notes.

The effect, especially with familiar material, was electric. Jamal continues to be one of the jazz world’s greatest interpreters. Like Gil Evans, he deconstructs a tune before putting it into his own dramatic reassemblage, filled with intriguing new facets of sound and rhythm.

The technique was less successful, however, when applied to more obscure numbers, largely because the music’s many theatrical elements functioned on their own, without a central reference point. But even here the sense of style was ever present, giving a moderate-sized, enthusiastic crowd the opportunity to hear one of the jazz world’s true originals.

The Ahmad Jamal Trio at the Jazz Bakery, 3233 Helms Ave., Culver City. Tonight through Sunday at 8 and 9:30 p.m. $25. (310) 271-9039.