Pressure Sensitive

Before cutting his first headliner LP, sax player Ronnie Laws had done early ’70s gigs with both South African soul-jazz great Hugh Masekela and the burgeoning, something-to-prove Earth, Wind & Fire. And if the slick, crossover-friendly Pressure Sensitive seems a lot more frictionless than those artists by comparison, you can still hear where Laws’ tone really belongs in that particular transitional space between jazz and R&B, where no amount of smoothness can really subdue the unpredictable energy to his tenor and soprano solos. Sure, the songs are all less than five minutes and fine-tuned for format-hopping airplay, and sure, a few of them feel more like instrumental funk jams than anything in the same area code as bop — by design (dig his horn tackling the same melodic runs Chaka Khan roared through in his “Tell Me Something Good” cover) or by circumstance (classic disco-jazz opener “Always There” would be reworked into a vocal R&B track by Side Effect a year later, and eventually became a UK acid jazz hit for Incognito and Jocelyn Brown in 1991). But the same combination of easygoing smoothness and upscale funkiness that made it a sample goldmine for ’90s producers still has room to startle, even when Black Moon or Usher aren’t weaving their voices over its reconfigured structures. The relaxed intensity of “Tidal Wave” and the lively, joyful outburst of “Nothing to Lose” might not win over fusion skeptics, but they’re more than enough to justify a creativity that outstrips the commercial concerns.