producer; and finally in the recording of one of the staples from the Flack live repertoire, "Somewhere" (from West Side Story), a song to which she gives a competent, uninspired reading.

Aretha continually reminds us that she can sing with poise, control and restraint. In fact, her version of Bobby Womack's "That's the Way I Feel About 'Cha" generates the quiet fire that I so often miss in Roberta Flack's work. But it's a Pyrrhic victory for Aretha. As tasteful as the lavish orchestrations are more often than not they strait-jacket her. On "Angel," a lovely, simple tune her sister Carolyn (author of "Ain't No Way") composed, the confinement is most evident. The song deals in simple sentiment—the kind that comes most naturally to Aretha's music—but her vocal performance drowns in the sea of an overpowering string arrangement. One longs for her former production team of Wexler, Dowd and Mardin, who, in their occasionally simplistic arranging style, always left her free to just sing the song, leaving her the space and room to do the one thing she so obviously does best.

To make matters worse, the original compositions don't measure up to the standards she has been setting for herself. She and Bernice Hart have concocted one wonderful if overly ambitious item, "Master of Eyes (The Deepness of Your Eyes)." It contained lines as provocative as, "People say that the eyes tell stories and reveal the soul/Do yours reflect the sameness of one, the unity to have and to hold." Atlantic released it as a single. Regretably, it stiffed. It has inexplicably been omitted from the album, while the flip side, a slick show-off version of the King Pleasure jazz standard, "Moody's Mood for Love," is included.

Whereas "Master" may have over-extended itself by cramming more ideas into one song than most people can get into five, the other Franklin originals are strangely underdeveloped, especially the uptempo ones. "The Other Side of the Sky" and "Sister From Texas" are anemic, though the latter has a certain whimsy and the nice line, "You know, pride'll kill ya." The album closes with a sultry big band blues that, while well-executed, seems irrelevant to me.

The ballads fare slightly better. "That's the Way I Feel About Cha" could have used some judicious editing but under the proper circumstances—late at night, bottle of Dewar's nearby—it gets under my skin. "Mister S