Give Me the Night is the year's most romantic pop record and one of a handful of recent pop-fusion LPs that transcend the Muzaklike monotony of MOR-jazz. Four years ago, Breezin' established guitarist-singer George Benson as the king of this hip, high-gloss mood genre, in which a virtuoso could coolly strut his stuff without ever risking spontaneity. Until Give Me the Night, both Benson and the music he helped popularize seemed frozen by their own conventions. Technical prowess had become the equivalent of emotional detachment in a sound whose characteristic backbeat was a Latin-inflected light funk. At its most debased, this style amounted to little more than trivial cha-cha music.

The stiffness of Benson's declamatory singing, which strongly echoed Donny Hathaway's genteel pop-gospel, conformed to the calm aesthetics of pop-fusion propagated by such producers as Tommy LiPuma (Breezin'), Creed Taylor, Bob James and Dave Grusin. Quincy Jones, Give Me the Night's producer, was a genuine giant in the evolution of electroschlock. In the late Fifties, he led his own big band. Later, he served as a central figure in making bossa nova a viable trend. As a television and film composer, Jones was influential in bringing jazz and soul into the mainstream of incidental music. But in the last three years, this supremely facile craftsman of commercial hybrids has emerged as pop-soul's most creative producer-arranger. On Give Me the Night, Jones has found a way of lifting pop-fusion out of its doldrums while making it even more palatable. His idea of encasing fusion instrumentation within the aural extremes of lush Hollywood orchestration and stomping, four-to-the-floor funk has proved incredibly fruitful, as witnessed by his platinum triumphs with Michael Jackson, Rufus and Chaka Khan, and the Brothers Johnson. These albums established the flexibility of Quincy Jones' concept, and on Give Me the Night, he's brilliantly adapted it to George Benson.

Focusing on Benson's voice rather than his guitar, the new record convincingly portrays the star as a renaissance musical figure. Jones, who's worked with singers as dissimilar as Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin, is famous for his rapport with vocalists. On last year's Off the Wall, he elicited unexpected emotional depth from Michael Jackson, and now his tutelage has done wonders for Benson. With his oratorical tendencies tightly reined, George Benson sparkles as a polished pop-soul tenor with a stylistic facility that extends from Doobie Brothers-type pop-soul to whispery scat singing (the James Moody-Eddie Jefferson jazz standard, "Moody's Mood").

Give Me the Night is designed along the same lines as Off the Wall. Rod Temperton, the Heatwave alumnus who wrote "Rock with You," has provided several gossamer, hook-filled doodads that Jones and his repertory of studio wizards (Lee Ritenour, Herbie Hancock, John Robinson, Louis Johnson, Paulhino da Costa, Patti Austin, et al.) polish into a scintillating lather. But whereas Off the Wall was dance-oriented, with ballads used as changes of pace, Give Me the Night is dreamier and more "adult." Three of the last four songs–"Love Dance," "Star of a Story (X)" and "Turn Out the Lamplight" – contain the juiciest make-out music I've heard in ages. Though neither of the LP's instrumentals allows much jazzy spontaneity, both hold up as impressive set pieces. "Off Broadway," the hotter of the two, intercuts a fierce George Benson-Lee Ritenour guitar duel with squabbling horns against a strutting four-beat. It's a typical Quincy Jones hybrid: a pop hook developed with fusion instrumentation in a swing format over a funk bass.

The album's Top Forty crowd-pleasers carry the pop single to a peak of buoyant glamour. Temperton's "Love X Love" clones the groove of "Rock with You" as Benson borrows Michael Jackson's clipped, breathless phrasing. The more elegant "Give Me the Night" incorporates Swingle Singers-style vocalese, then explodes dramatically into a rhythmless dance break of heavily echoed chorus. Also included is the best of many recent tributes to the Doobie Brothers' Michael McDonald: the Kerry Chater-Glen Ballard tune, "What's on Your Mind."

Give Me the Night ultimately succeeds by not trying too hard to pose as a jazz record. By dressing funk in symphonic tie and tails and thawing fusion's icy palette with funk's crackling heat, Quincy Jones and George Benson have forged a magnificent synthesis of black music's four main currents: pop, funk, disco and jazz. Call it symphonic funk or pop-swing. Whatever it is, Give Me the Night is really something. (RS 328)

STEPHEN HOLDEN