Peabo Bryson: The Best of Peabo Bryson

After such a promising start, soul music’s evolution since Ray Charles combined gospel and blues has been, to put it mildly, disappointing. After Charles’s music began to get drowned, Buddy-Holly-style, in the dreck of gentile production, soul exploded like few other genres have ever done, producing Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Sam and Dave, and many others in the span of just a few years. At the same time, soul’s refined cousin to the north, Motown, was providing the bridge between black and white audiences that has been trafficked so heavily in the ensuing decades. But, as Peter Guralnick points out in his excellent Sweet Soul Music, the death of Martin Luther King squashed the dreams of interracial harmony that the music espoused, and without its leading light in Otis Redding, soul was ill-equipped to soldier on.

Even if the composite that was soul music broke up in the late ’60s, its elements survived, forming new genres. The hard edge of soul took root in the music of James Brown, morphing into funk, while the ballad-heavy part of soul became smooth soul/quiet storm (the distinction between the two is hazy). Any of soul’s remaining political overtones remained firmly with funk, but the primary concern of both sides was sex, the only difference being that smooth soul stressed its love (or slick seductiveness, à la Let’s Get It On and everything Barry White ever did), while funk was more, shall we say, earthy about sexual matters. Throughout the ’70s, funk remained interesting if never quite so much as when Sly Stone and James Brown were at their peaks, but smooth soul and quiet storm began dragging soul’s legacy downwards towards its current position on lite rock stations and, more prominently, on American Idol, where it is bastardized on a weekly basis.

One of the lesser known stars of this process is Peabo Bryson. He came into his own in the late ’70s, long after Al Green, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye had set the standards for the decade’s version of soul. Still, he was a significant hit-maker in his time, with gold records and a number two R&B hit with Michael Zager’s Moon Band, “I’m So Into You”. But Columbia/Legacy’s The Best of Peabo Bryson ignores his work in the late ’70s and early ’80s and starts instead with the music that finalized the divorce between original soul and its current form. Consequently, all the tracks on Best Of feature tinny drum machines, cheese-ball synths, and fine but pointless singing over bland backing tracks. If this is your thing (or if 2001’s Anthology left you hungering for more Peabo), then this disc is for you.

But for the rest of us who love soul and hate where it’s gone, Peabo Bryson and his brethren are more frustrating than an occupying army is to Moqtada al-Sadr. Bryson has an excellent voice, with great control and a silky tone, but little of what he’s done and none of what’s featured on this album are worthy of it. The cruelest cuts of all are the final two tracks, “A Whole New World” and “Beauty and the Beast”. Yes, these pieces of Disney schlock are considered by the execs at Columbia to be among the best of Peabo Bryson. That “Beauty and the Beast” is a duet with Celine Dion is especially telling. The woman who begins every song with a dramatic whisper and ends with a flatulent burst of hysterical wailing actually fits in with Bryson rather than serving as a contrast from good soul singing — something that includes control, restraint, and the development of tension. True, Bryson never claimed to be Otis Redding, but shouldn’t it bother him as much as it bothers me that Joss Stone, a 16-year-old British girl, comes a lot closer than he does?