The Positive Rap

Roberta Flack owes her career to having emerged at a time when songwriting excellence was paramount in R&B;, and stylistic boundaries were easily permeable.

Like most soul music notables of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, Flack had to adapt during the dubious late ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s, when producers and their machines, not songwriters and their imaginations, ruled the genre. Pop-R&B;’s functionality as music for the party pad or boudoir came to matter more than the artistic wholeness formed by a strong lyric, an evocative melody and a graceful performance.

The Fugees’ success last year with a not-so-radically altered version of Flack’s 1973 signature hit, “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” was a sign that classic virtues are returning to nourish a genre thirsty for the character of good songwriting.

In other climates, Flack’s early show on Friday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre might have been taken as fondly nostalgic. But with such encouraging signs in the air, it was a current and relevant nod to the success of the Fugees, Maxwell and Dionne Farris.

Besides singing most of her best-loved early songs, Flack drew upon material she covered on “Roberta,” the 1994 album in which she eschewed bland, techno-R&B; formulas for pop, soul, blues and jazz-ballad standards.

In a 90-minute concert, the phony-horns keyboard blares and exaggeratedly plangent drumbeats of her straitjacketed post-disco days returned only on “Back Together Again”--and even then the playful delivery, with Flack doing the bump with backing singers Ada Dyer and Andre Smith, made for a fun moment.

Otherwise the show offered elegant, well-honed settings for a singing approach that relied not on the melismatic showiness of latter-day R&B; but on nuanced attention to a song’s emotions and dynamics.

Flack never held her microphone higher than armpit level, which meant that her smooth, finely grained voice, with its controlled, expansive vibrato, came swaddled in ambient air. It demanded a sensitive band--which she had--and an attentive audience willing to hang on each phrase--which she also had.

In place of showy display, Flack offered deep feeling. The yearning in her voice, and on her leonine face, was palpable and affecting in two show-opening appeals for connection, “Why Don’t You Move in With Me” and “The Closer I Get to You.”

Some of Flack’s material went down a bit too smoothly--the refusal to be devastated by a breakup conveyed in a peppy, light-funk reading of “The Thrill Is Gone” was no substitute for the searing existential dread of B.B. King’s original. Her reading of the raw, gospel-fired Southern-soul oldie “Reverend Lee” could have used more grit, and she was generally more at home with pop-tinged strains of soul music. Still, overall her performance was anything but shallow.

“Killing Me Softly” was exquisite, rendered just like Flack’s original recording, except for a dip at the end into a pool of haunting mystery. The song is an ode to the power of singing and songwriting to reach listeners in their deepest places; a more fittingly emblematic song for R&B;’s current challenges could not be found.

The house was less than full, and Flack had a late show with a larger crowd ahead of her. But she paused repeatedly for personal asides and reminiscences, including memories of how she and Donny Hathaway combined in a hit duet-team of two amply built singers who would “waddle on and waddle off.” Smith, a strong young baritone, stood in for Hathaway, who died in a suicide leap in 1979, and for Flack’s ‘80s duet partner, Peabo Bryson. Smith employed some of the showy turns of more recent pop-R&B; styling, but he and Flack made their romantic duets persuasively loving.

At 58, Flack still sets a good example, singing not to play out a diva trip but to bring alive feelings.