POP MUSIC REVIEW : Stansfield Versatile as a Vocalist

On stage, at least, white soul singer Lisa Stansfield can’t dance to save her life. And probably doesn’t want to.

At Stansfield’s L.A. debut Thursday at downtown’s newly reopened Mayan Theatre, her hoofing was mostly limited to furiously pacing back and forth like a hyped-up insomniac. In the world of dance-pop, especially after recent Bob Fosse-inspired trips to town by Janet Jackson and the Material Girl, this might seem like a crippling liability.

Nor is her sex appeal overwhelming. About as suggestive as she gets is singing, “I know where you’re coming from, ‘cause I’m a woman ,” emphasizing the last part by running her hand up and down the length of her torso.

But she does have it all over her contemporaries in a related, albeit less commercially vital, discipline: She can sing . Yes, to save her life, and maybe even somebody else’s.

This 23-year-old upstart star’s versatile vocals are perfectly in the pocket for the kind of revivified black music she sings--classy R&B; inspired by an era on the first cusp of disco in the mid-’70s, when Stansfield would have been not yet pubescent.

This kind of soul--popularized by other talented English musicians like Soul II Soul as well as Stansfield--replaces the monotonous thump of that era with the funkier syncopation of modern hip-hop and house music, but the silky singing and pseudo-string arrangements wouldn’t sound out of place between Boz Scaggs and Barry White.

The hooks in Stansfield’s songs are composed craftily enough that she doesn’t have to take her voice to the melismatic extremes that she clearly could; the melodic range is written right in. And, even live, she delivers the songs pretty close to the vest, without much improvisation, yet sings them with enough supple force that you tend to believe her when she croons (with considerable potential for corn) that “no two people ever felt this way” and adds, for effect, “In this wooooorld! In this wooooorld!”

Her recent “Affection” album, which includes the catchy hit “All Around the World,” is as wonderful as English whites worshiping American black music gets--marvelously romantic and rhythmic. Yet, good as it is, some of the songs tend to blur into one another, and the musical concept isn’t quite enough to base a lasting career on. Even savoring the flavor of what she and her producers have done, mostly in small doses, you hope she’ll stretch herself in the future.

The Mayan show didn’t offer much in the way of expansion. A full band replaced the album’s two-man instrumentation, complete with up to three percussionists working to reproduce the full force of the LP’s drum programming. But the effect was much the same--usually no better, no worse.

Stansfield did have one surprise up her sleeve: a mid-set rendition of Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning, Heartache,” which she handled with all the bluesy ease and playfully despairing intensity you’d expect and hope for. What she does so entertainingly now is probably enough for one so fresh and so young--it’s hoped that this stray ballad was a precursor of vision and variety to come.