Review: David Gilmour shines on at the end of a beautifully haunting three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl

With a musical and cultural legacy so vast it’s nearly impossible to quantify, singer/guitarist David Gilmour could easily rest on his impressive laurels.Especially at 78, when some of his British brethren and peers, including ELO’s Jeff Lynne, are making final-bow tours of greatest hits.

But Gilmour, who joined psych-prog progenitors Pink Floyd two years after the band’s 1965 inception, proved vibrant and vital at his fourth show in Los Angeles and final evening of a three-night-stand at the Hollywood Bowl.Anyone who has listened to an FM rock station in the last 50 years likely has at least a half-dozen Pink Floyd songs committed to memory.With 1973’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and 1979’s “The Wall” collectively selling more than 80 million albums worldwide, the band’s evocative, provocative lyrics and trippy, sometimes pointed and painful video and visual accompaniment are as heady as Floyd’s singular sound.A 20-song set spanning more than two hours (with an intermission) featured enough Floyd classics, including “The Great Gig in the Sky,” “Breathe (In the Air),” and a pitch-perfect encore of “Comfortably Numb” for even a casual fan.

Not that there were a lot in attendance; Gilmour aficionados tend toward the fanatical, the guitarist’s instantly recognizable tone and solos, notably the emotive psych-blues of “Comfortably Numb,” iconic.Pink Floyd’s last tour was in 1994; the group’s final, one-off live performance in 2005 (at Live8), and the acrimony stemming from personal, creative and legal battles between Gilmour and bassist/singer/songwriter Roger Waters is unlikely to ever cease.But Gilmour does a wonderful job of balancing Floyd material with his solo catalog of five studio albums since 1978.Songs from his 2024 “Luck and Strange LP” mesh seamlessly with older material, thanks in no small part to a stellar band that includes a trio of female singers/instrumentalists who made “The Great Gig in the Sky” heave...