Riley Guides a Lively Tour Through the Many Musical Moods of His Mind

Improvisation is an art which usually knows its place. In jazz and various world music traditions, it’s a given. In western classical music, it’s a rarity. There are exceptions, of course, such as the singular world of Terry Riley, the proto-minimalist composer who showed up at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall on Friday for a free-ranging solo piano concert.

One could easily detect Riley’s unique range of musical instincts--including jazz, folk, “art” music and the North Indian classical tradition--in this solo forum. It mattered not that the edges were sometimes rough, a hallmark of improvisation-rich performance, after all.

The influential 63-year-old composer-performer tends to seamlessly co-opt elements from jazz, in his phrasing and basic improvisational language. But jazz is less a factor harmonically. He normally prefers variations on specific tonalities and modal patterns, rather than the roaming harmonic detours favored by many jazz pianists. But it’s hard to generalize with the mercurial musician: a roiling modal vamp was followed by an enigmatic ballad with echoes of Thelonious Monk’s clusters and Gershwin’s melodic bent.

Riley opened the second set with “Waltz of the Insomniacs,” its chordal waltz pattern in the right hand contrasting with left hand meanderings--a pleasing walk through the woods of Riley’s mind. On the vocal front, he sang an oblique folk-like song and, later, a raga for the rainy season, exercising his supple North Indian vocal style, one of his secret weapons.

If Riley’s solo piano work is, by nature, reflective, he never uses that meditative condition as license to coast. Ever present is the sense of an active musical mind at work, nudging the content into places that we, and he, don’t quite expect. On this night, the light was on--low--and someone was definitely home.