Teenage pianist Eldar displays skill, passion beyond his years

The future of jazz looked bright Thursday night at Scullers, where 18-year-old piano phenom Eldar packed the house with an audience ranging from teens younger than himself to folks in their golden years.

Eldar, who dispenses with his last name (Djangirov) professionally, sauntered onstage in blue jeans and an untucked black shirt, its sleeves unbuttoned at the wrist, and launched into ''Point of View." The piece, a fiendishly fast and challenging original performed with sax virtuoso Michael Brecker on Eldar's debut album, showed off the pianist at his best.

''Point of View" is a tune requiring technical wizardry, and Eldar carried it off breathtakingly. Brecker wasn't with him at Scullers, but the tune didn't lack much for his absence, and Eldar's trio mates -- bassist Marco Panascia and drummer Carmen Intorre -- stayed tightly alongside the young leader despite it being Intorre's first night on the job.

Bobby Timmons's ''Moanin'," made famous by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, followed. This one featured a lot of athletic pianism as well, somewhat to its detriment. The bluesy funkiness of Blakey's version got mostly stripped out in favor of flashy chops. It called to mind the veteran jazzman offering a young colleague the pseudo-compliment ''You play a lot of notes" -- the older guy's slyly made point being that fewer notes and more feeling would be an improvement.

Eldar also played more filigree than necessary on the ballad ''Body & Soul" but revealed a refined touch to complement his ability to play at warp speed. When the others left the stage, Eldar dazzled the crowd with a blazing-fast run-through of Chick Corea's ''Armando's Rhumba," hamming it up with a classical introduction before racing through the piece at a pace Corea might have had trouble keeping up with.

''Raindrops," an Eldar original from the CD, with a faintly new agey feel to it, was followed by a bland cover of ''Fly Me to the Moon," its piano-bar prettiness propped up only slightly by Eldar's technique. The pace and interest level picked up again for Eldar's tribute to Herbie Hancock, ''Watermelon Island," for which Panascia switched to electric bass.

Then the set ended as strongly as it began. Eldar took an unaccompanied encore on ''Take the 'A' Train" that had him sounding like a hyper-caffeinated piano roll. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn would have loved it.