On the Way to Love

Paul Brown's mafia of smooth-jazz writers and musicians gives Patti Austin's career a boost with this R&B and pop-oriented disc. The songs are well-crafted gems that extol the virtues of love and female solidarity and they suit Austin's crystal-clear tone and sharp phrasing quite well. The opening track, "Girlfriend," cowritten by Brown and Austin, is an upbeat ditty that sounds like a theme from a morning TV talk show. It is indicative of the rest of the album, in that Austin makes it sound as she has lived the tune. Like an actress appearing in different films, the singer delivers with conviction on each song. When Brown touches on the funk side of R&B as a producer (as he did on Al Jarreau's Tomorrow Today), the results seem less sanitized than when he works with instrumentalists, evidenced here on the hot numbers, "Make It Right" and "Playing Around." The producer obviously sees Austin's musical place as being in the adult contemporary pop world, because it would be a stretch to call most of these 11 hook-laden tracks smooth jazz. --Mark Ruffin