jazz tune makes an interesting comment on both her budding acting career and her capacity for doing more than Top 40 belting. (Compared to Ross on "Smile," Maria Muldaur seems a truly rank amateur.) Her own production of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson's "Ain't Nothin' but a Maybe" proves she's comfortably in tune with the disco idiom, which hardly seemed likely.

The rest is straightforward. "Theme from Mahogany" is syrupy, but that may be deliberate. It sounds like old-fashioned movie music, which is an apt definition of the kind of star Diana Ross is. "I Thought It Took a Little Time (But Today I Fell in Love)" is the kind of song Hal David and Burt Bacharach used to deliver regularly to Warwicke. Ross devastates it, bringing to a lyric that is essentially a cliché both emotive power and true control. Her phrasing is simply remarkable, working out the tension between the sweetness of her voice and Gene Page's explosive, mnemonic arrangement. When she hits the chorus, other interpreters, particularly the litany of white amateurs so often praised by critics, simply fade away. Ronstadt, Muldaur, Raitt and the rest simply could not handle material simultaneously so mature and overtly sensual. Which only proves what is easy to forget between hits: Diana Ross is a popular music artist of the most regal kind. (RS 212)

DAVE MARSH