She sat behind the tiny acoustic piano, took a deep breath, pulled her long chocolate colored hair back and slowly began stroking the keys. Jennifer Terran's hour long set at Luna park was truly an exercise in passion- by far one of the best shows I have seen this year.

Terran has a unique musical gift. With her words as well as her music, she conveys a mixture of grace and rage, which is at times unsettling. Howerver, it is this strange juxtaposition of moods that makes Terran's work so powerful. And on that warm July night in West Hollywod, Terran proved once again that she has become a force to be reckoned with.

It seemed as pointless then as it does now to try to create adjectives to properly describe Terran's soul filled set, which opened with the title track off her debut CD, Cruel. It was intense, and when Terran sang "lovers in bliss's illusion, afraid to fart" from her slow piano suite she got our attention. This is Terran's thing, it's what she does- she is a classically trained pianist who wows you with subtlety, eventually hitting you over the head with her fearless and sometime straight out loopy lyrics.

The highpoint of the evening came during the song "LA 101" when Terran stood and whispered the chorus "LA 101 so off and disturbing, LA 101, do they know what they're missing" into a megaphone. Her voice was muffled and eerie, sounding similar to the recorded version. I looked around and saw dropped jaws all over the place during this gem of a song about a contemplative journey down the LA freeway. The audience was clearly in awe as Terran went on to belt out the lyrics "with the man in the Porsche just beside me, should I take the risk of attention drawn to me…"

Terran was joined on stage be her musical partner, Brendan Statom, on double bass, a drummer, and occasional cellist and her father- legendary trumpet player, Tony Terran. As Terran closed her set with the bluesy "Daddy's $," I began to wonder why this gifted musician hasn't experienced commercial "success" in a way that so many other more benign singers have. But my pondering on the politics of the music industry was quickly interrupted by Terran's wide smile and snapping fingers. She looked totally gratified as she sang "well it's so bleak to think of yourself wasting away in a regular job when you just want to sing, sing and be free…