Flack Emphasizes the Songwriting

Like most soul music notables who emerged in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, Roberta Flack had to adapt later on, when producers and their machines, not songwriters and their imaginations, came to rule R&B.;

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 the classic virtues are returning to nourish a genre thirsty for the character that good songwriting brings.

In other climates, Flack’s early show at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana on Friday might be taken as fondly nostalgic. But with encouraging signs in the air, it was a current and relevant assent to the emphasis on songwriting reflected in the success of the Fugees, Maxwell and Dionne Farris.

Besides singing most of the best-loved songs from her early days, Flack drew on well-known pop and jazz songs she covered on “Roberta,” the 1994 album in which she finally said “enough” to bland, techno-R&B; formulas that didn’t suit a singer.

“Killing Me Softly” was exquisite, rendered just like her 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 and hopes for recovery couldn’t be found.