Rickie Lee Jones livens up Cerritos

It's not often that “live performance” and “music-making” are actually one and the same — rarer still to witness when they come together in a public setting.

Rickie Lee Jones showed how it’s done Thursday with an unusually chatty and exceptionally illuminating night at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

She’d played a series of solo shows back in February at the Echoplex in a residency that let her follow her muse on the turn of a dime. This time she was accompanied by a five-piece band including some old collaborators (guitarist David Kalish) and new ones (drummer David Leach and impossibly young-looking keyboardist Wyatt Stone).

It was clear from her steady stream of questions and requests to her cohorts on stage that this was anything but a meticulously rehearsed machine re-creating in public what had been perfected in private.

Rather, Jones is one of those true artists who strives to make music come alive at the very moment she plays and sings it. You couldn’t for an instant call what she did with “Nobody Knows My Name,” from last year’s “The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard” album a “performance” or “rendition.” The better term would be “delivery”: the process of giving birth to something suddenly alive in a new way.

She was intensely sad — at times on the verge of tears — frustrated, yearning, hopeful and confused by turns, living each moment of the song’s spiritual quest as the words rolled off her tongue. That was pretty much characteristic of her two hours on stage.

She periodically conducted with one hand, between guitar strums or notes on the piano to which she often moved, and near the end playfully encouraged the band members to toy with different treatments they’d recently been experimenting with for “Chuck E.’s in Love.”

It was far from the most polished night of music in memory — especially with the many technical issues that cropped up alongside the musical ones. But it was certainly one of the truly magical ones.

--Randy Lewis

Photo: Rickie Lee Jones at the Echoplex earlier this year. Credit: Stefano Paltera / For The Times