George Benson - Give CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

cha-cha music.

The stiffness of Benson's declamatory singing, which strongly echoed Donny Hathaway's genteel pop-gospel, conformed to the calm aesthetics of pop-fusion propagated by such producers as Tommy LiPuma (Breezin'), Creed Taylor, Bob James and Dave Grusin. Quincy Jones, Give Me the Night's producer, was a genuine giant in the evolution of electroschlock. In the late Fifties, he led his own big band. Later, he served as a central figure in making bossa nova a viable trend. As a television and film composer, Jones was influential in bringing jazz and soul into the mainstream of incidental music. But in the last three years, this supremely facile craftsman of commercial hybrids has emerged as pop-soul's most creative producer-arranger. On Give Me the Night, Jones has found a way of lifting pop-fusion out of its doldrums while making it even more palatable. His idea of encasing fusion instrumentation within the aural extremes of lush Hollywood orchestration and stomping, four-to-the-floor funk has proved incredibly fruitful, as witnessed by his platinum triumphs with Michael Jackson, Rufus and Chaka Khan, and the Brothers Johnson. These albums established the flexibility of Quincy Jones' concept, and on Give Me the Night, he's brilliantly adapted it to George Benson.

Focusing on Benson's voice rather than his guitar, the new record convincingly portrays the star as a renaissance musical figure. Jones, who's worked with singers as dissimilar as Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin, is famous for his rapport with vocalists. On last year's Off the Wall, he elicited unexpected emotional depth from Michael Jackson, and now his tutelage has done wonders for Benson. With his oratorical tendencies tightly reined, George Benson sparkles as a polished pop-soul tenor with a stylistic facility that extends from Doobie Brothers-type pop-soul to whispery scat singing (the James Moody-Eddie Jefferson jazz standard, "Moody's Mood").

Give Me the Night is designed along the same lines as Off the Wall. Rod Temperton, the Heatwave alumnus who wrote "Rock with You," has provided several gossamer, hook-filled doodads that Jones and his repertory of studio wizards (Lee Ritenour, Herbie Hancock, John Robinson,