Aaron Neville has joked that when he was born, he responded not with a cry but with the emotional falsetto that keynoted his 1966 hit "Tell It Like It Is." But it took his high-profile duets with Linda Ronstadt and her co-production of Warm Your Heart, from 1991, to bring Neville back to the mass audience he has always deserved. Within the Neville Brothers, Aaron is the tough-looking guy who takes your breath away with a ballad after the band's fast songs have left you winded. Solo, he's a soft soulman in the tradition of his earliest influences, Nat "King" Cole and Sam Cooke, and a master at shaping his vibrato around the lyric to give each phrase an individual spin.

The Grand Tour mixes genres and periods while keeping the musical focus on the soulfully mellow. The material comes from a variety of celebrated songwriters, including Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, George Jones, Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen. In that respect, it recalls collections by a vocalist like Ella Fitzgerald, and Neville is certainly one of the few contemporary pop singers who could keep such company. More to the point, perhaps, is that The Grand Tour opens with a snappy adult-contemporary tune by Diane Warren and concludes with an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Lord's Prayer. Yet in spite of its obvious calculations, the album is considerably less stuffy than its predecessor, and Neville's singing is much more accomplished.

The arrangements are carefully sculpted but still limber, with Warren's "Don't Take Away My Heaven" boasting the bounce of a Motown tune and "My Brother, My Brother" suggesting the sleek soul of Boz Scaggs' Silk Degrees. Neville's own "Roadie Song" cooks up a familiar New Orleans groove, while Berry's "You Never Can Tell" throws a welcome curveball by emphasizing a barrelhouse piano instead of a shuffling guitar. Neville can occasionally sound ornamental, and two songs try almost too hard to be pretty. Leonard Cohen's dulcet "Song of Bernadette" makes for a perilously ripe Neville-Ronstadt duet. And on "Ain't No Way," monumentally familiar from Aretha Franklin's original, you find yourself more interested in seeing if Neville goes over the top with his vocal embellishments than in whether he adds a truly new dimension to the song.

Neville finds fresher angles on two less familiar ballads – Marvin Gaye's atmospheric "The Bells" and the more traditionally styled "These Foolish Things." On these tunes, Neville sings with a passion that does not confuse emotion with affectation. He also takes a plunge into country with Dylan's "Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight" and a stunning interpretation of the title track, George Jones's meditation on broken dreams.

The Grand Tour is a journey through the American songbook artfully led by an American original. (RS 662)

JOHN MILWARD