Adventures In Paradise

Minnie Riperton’s death from cancer aged just 31 was one of the great losses to music. Over six albums with Rotary Connection and five solo, she was not just an extraordinary voice but a luminous creative presence — and she would certainly have gone onto many more great things. This, her third solo record, followed Perfect Angel and the gigantic hit “Loving You” — at the time it didn’t have the commercial impact of its predecessor, but thankfully time has got it the audiences it deserved. The album sits midway between the psychedelic soul of Rotary Connection and “Les Fleurs” and the disco-adjacent slickness of her final two albums. The frankly filthy “Inside my Love” was the hit here, and still sounds great, but there’s plenty to match it: the rambunctiously funky title track, and “Minnie’s Lament” with her highest register building layers upon layers using echo effects over eerie metallic percussion — and reminding just how porous the boundary was in the mid-70s between smooth soul and the exploratory spiritual jazz of artists like Don Cherry and Alice Coltrane.