Gerald Clayton "Two Shade"

The 25-year old jazz pianist Gerald Clayton plays with a grand and amiable virtuosity: Oscar Peterson is important to his style. But the last 10 years or so have changed the way such a style reaches us.

Young jazz rhythm sections don’t rely as much on swing rhythm anymore; native to hip-hop and drum-and-bass, they’ve figured out new, advanced ways of phrasing funk. Drummers aren’t necessarily swinging through a piece, even if it’s based on a repeating vamp; they’re filling it up with odd accents, flash-fills and rearrangements of beats that make a song sound like it’s slowing down or speeding up. Consequently, naturally expansive players like Mr. Clayton can sound a little hemmed in.

In “Two-Shade,” the first album by this musician of unusual polish and self-assurance, Mr. Clayton fights back, putting charm into the new style. He doesn’t show bursts of true aggression like, say, Don Pullen, whose late trio recordings this one sometimes evokes, consciously or not. He doesn’t have the bewilder-the-audience mindset that comes naturally to ambitious players in New York. (He’s from Los Angeles and has developed his craft there; the amiability gene could also come from his father, the bassist John Clayton, and his uncle, the saxophonist Jeff Clayton.)

In any case, he’s built a wide-ranging, self-confident album, and a fluent, bobbing-and-weaving relationship with the bassist Joe Sanders and the drummer Justin Brown: he doesn’t have to be center stage all the time. “Boogablues” rolls on New Orleans rhythm; “Two Heads One Pillow” uses R&B slow-jam tactics, and “Sunny Day Go” suggests somber samba with a classical-music keyboard touch. “Peace for the Moment” begins as a solo-piano ballad, then builds up slowly with the trio by repetition of an odd-metered phrase that sounds like the live re-creation of a sample. (It’s a performance with connections to Robert Glasper’s and Jason Moran’s work during this decade.) I’m not sure what’s going on in the theme of “Casiotone Pothole,” a waltz with light funk and an oohing synthesizer, but things straighten out when the Casio goes away.

Mr. Clayton is a smoother-outer: it’s evident that he really likes order in music. And so it’s fascinating to hear him step up to fragmentation, in his own moderate way.