R. Kelly threw a New Year’s Eve party to remember for himself and about 5,000 paying guests on Monday night at American Airlines Arena. For all the self-created trouble surrounding the r&b star, this concert was a genuinely happy occasion and — with some exceptions — a break from the weirdness and difficulty of being R. Kelly.

If he has to face the music in 2008 — if his trial on charges of soliciting a minor for pornography does go forward as scheduled in May, and if he’s convicted — he’ll always have Miami.

Kelly, who turns 41 next week, seemed determined to make this stop on his “Double Up” tour a retrospective affair. “I can’t help it if I wrote all these hits,” he said. But it wasn’t so much a greatest-hits-live set as it was a show of greatest snippets.

Kelly did a handful of songs whole, and some of those performances were masterful. He ravished Your Body’s Callin’, with a long, improvisational coda built around a plaintive piano figure. He then apologized for getting “carried away,” though no explanation was needed for this appreciative crowd. He sang Real Talk a-capella, into a cellphone. As his pealing voice rose and fell throughout the male half of an imaginary break-up, the anger, bewilderment, confusion and good-riddance-hangup sounded both melodramatic and genuine. (Given his exploits, it’s possible Kelly exists in a fixed state of melodrama.)

But DJ method was the order of the evening: Kelly and his agile band hip-hopped their way through his remarkable, prolific career as a singer, songwriter and hit machine.

There were indulgent production numbers befitting a big ego and an arena-sized stage. Kelly entered like a prizefighter, walking through the crowd to The Champ with his face half-hidden under a spangled hoodie. He took a lap dance during I’m a Flirt and submitted to a Nubian queen during a fun-in-the jungle sequence that was beyond silly but well choreographed. He stepped on to a rostrum in white tails to conduct Beethoven’s Fifth, while the Vari-lites above him twirled and beamed on cue.

This was Kelly playing in a million-dollar sandbox and having a blast. Interestingly, he omitted his most famous set piece, Trapped In The Closet, the soap-operatic song cycle. A better candidate for deletion was a big-booty ode that he introduced as brand new. “I tried to service it to radio and they said, ‘Hell, no, Kels, we can’t play that [expletive]. It’s too sexual,’ ” he said.

The sex wasn’t the problem; the insane mismatch of topic and tone was. Kelly set his anatomical ogle to what sounded like a borrowed show tune and ended it with a long, Broadway-esque note that should have had the crowd in stitches.

In any case, Kelly had parts or all of enough familiar and likeable songs — Ignition, Down Low, Step in the Name of Love and at least two dozen more — to occupy a two-hour set that spilled into the new year. The show ended with a shower of confetti and balloons, while Kelly sang Happy People and decorated it with interludes from a pair of hopeful-sounding TV themes: Welcome Back, Kotter and Good Times.