From The True Hot Heart

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: RAY CHARLES

ALBUM: MY WORLD

LABEL: WARNER BROS.

THE BOTTOM LINE: A whistle-slick set of stylish tunes is a reminder that there's still genius beneath the hustle.

What becalms a legend most? Familiarity and longevity are the twin chief curses of American celebrity. Hustling Pepsi on TV -- in the foxy company of a trio of backup singers hovering over the keyboard, dispensing flash-point smiles -- may do wonders for the soda, but it does tend to sell soul a bit short. It's tough to be a genius and a pitchman at the same time, especially when the TV spots contain more concentrated energy than your last half-dozen albums.

The prescription for Ray Charles seems simple: Work on the music and let the image take care of itself. With his new album, the cure is in hand. My World offers 10 songs, some tonic sonic production, and the man himself, sounding looser and more engaged than he has since Seattle blew in and rap took roost. My World is touched by up-to-date accents -- a techno flourish here, a bit of street beat there -- but it mostly presents Ray Charles himself, foursquare, singing from the soulful heart of pop. And that's plenty good enough.

The album opens with the title track, one of those kick-butt anthems of territorial superiority favored by old lions when the cubs get unruly. "The time has come to air my feelings," Charles proclaims. "There's just so much confusion going down." When the wary listener hears, "You got to stand out from the crowd," preparations begin immediately to endure one of those tauntingly defiant My Way-style apologias. But after this initial flirtation, Charles goes his own way, and My World becomes instead a guardedly optimistic paean to human potential. It's damn near Jacksonesque (Michael or the Rev. Jesse, your pick) and sends the album off on a smooth trip where the air is rare.

Charles does a lovely cover of the Leon Russell evergreen, A Song for You, and follows it with an intense rendering of None of Us Are Free. The latter expands on the opening cut in a way that's both more pointed and more poignant, with an Eric Clapton guitar solo that complements Charles' anvil- hard vocal and leavens the message with saving lyricism.

Although there are other social asides, the true hot heart of the record is its love songs, whether religious (So Help Me God), romantic (If I Could) or street savvy (the nifty Love Has a Mind of Its Own). To ensure, however, that the genius has not gone soft of heart or of social conscience, he finishes up with a dextrous cover of Still Crazy After All These Years. As he skims over Paul Simon's elegant lines of predawn rumination, Charles sounds bluesy and bemused, crazy with a vengeance and a purpose. "Yeah, baby," he growls, "you got me by your little finger," and so he's got us, just the same. Same as ever.