Diana Ross: Blue

Like Chet Baker, Diana Ross has a curiously ingratiating way of floating ethereally above songs without quite committing to them. While the effortlessly intimate Frank Sinatra sounds like he's dictating his songs to a sympathetic bartender minutes before closing time, Ross' delivery often suggests that she's encountering lyrics for the first time, but is determined to give them a whirl all the same. This detachment reaches a strange apotheosis on "I Loves Ya Porgy," the centerpiece of Blue, a long-shelved 1972 album of standards Ross recorded to coincide with her performance as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings The Blues.

"I Loves Ya Porgy" features a profound, almost surreal disconnect between the lyrics' grim, masochistic despair and longing for deliverance, and the sound's swinging cosmopolitan vibe. It's George Gershwin's earthy opus as interpreted from Berry Gordy's penthouse by a diva in Chanel surrounded by a big band in cream-colored tuxedoes. On "I Loves Ya Porgy," Ross wisely follows the old dictum to sing a sad song happy, but her fumbling attempts at vamping and scat singing late in the song betray her inexperience at working outside the Motown sound.

Ross has a famously thin voice; Ella Fitzgerald could have eaten her for breakfast, but her limited instrument is deftly employed on effervescent concoctions like "Let's Do It," "Can't Get Started With You," and the fizzily masochistic "Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do." Ross and Motown are selling a different, more upscale kind of fantasy here than they did with The Supremes, but Blue's glossy, shimmering surfaces are still awfully seductive.