The maturation of Joe Jackson as an artist over the last few years has been very impressive to watch. From ranking second or third in the "angry young man" class of British rockers behind star student Elvis Costello, he has progressed to being a very personal singer and songwriter and a composer of extended musical pieces that reveal broad skills and even broader ambitions. If Jackson hasn't entirely shaken off the callowness of earlier outings, Body and Soul is nonetheless a breakthrough. It establishes him as the first of the British postpunks to show an interest in bridging the gap between pop music and serious music, the way the previous generation of American songwriters like Randy Newman and Paul Simon did.

At his worst, Jackson is a British Billy Joel, a self-conscious striver prone to blatant imitation and self-cannibalization. For example, "Go for It," with its Motown intro, its relentless propulsion, the organ echo under the chorus, the horns, could have been lifted intact off of Costello's Get Happy!! LP, while "Be My Number Two" is a lesser rewrite of "Breaking Us in Two" from Jackson's Night and Day. Fortunately, Jackson shares the good humor rather than the slavishness of Joel's copycat mentality – though clearly a déjà vu, "Happy Ending" is both a loving hommage to pouty early-Sixties pop and a truly delightful, infectious duet (sung with Elaine Caswell). Unlike some of Jackson's forays into Latin-pop hybrids, "Cha Cha Loco" seems a bit earnest and almost condescending, with its corny images of crazy dancing Latins and reference to They Shoot Horses, Don't They? But on "You Can't Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)," Jackson gets away with studiousness. Here is a bracing, sophisticated tune that successfully incorporates pop lyricism, a tight funk band and jazz compositional structures; of the several songs on Body and Soul that prominently, even shockingly, feature a brash horn section, the charts on this tune are the most exciting.

The album's two major ballads extend the capacity for personal songwriting that Jackson unveiled on Night and Day's brilliant "Real Men." The LP opens with "The Verdict," an emotional, and at times mawkish, song about personal morality given a carefully Spectorish production that links it to the grandness of Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road." Its first lines could be a dying, conscience-striken man's last words: "Did you do me right?/Did I do right by you?" And the song almost frighteningly muses over the preoccupations of a lifetime: "We don't know what happens when we die/We only know we die too soon/But we have to try or else/Our world becomes a waiting room." Only the verse about wondering "what the critics have to say" seems overly mundane, unworthy of the song's philosophical quest – maybe just because it seems so humorless to sing about something so ultimately unimportant as "critics." No such problems with "Not Here, Not Now," a big, fat, dramatic ballad about trying to hide a disintegrating relationship from friends, which is utterly gorgeous in its simplicity – from the ticking drum machine (shades of "Real Men") to Michael Morreale's fluegelhorn solo to Jackson's vocal, his most wide-open and heartfelt ever.

Equally impressive, and a new development for Jackson, are the two instrumentals that frame side two of Body and Soul. Their root must certainly be in his score for Mike's Murder, which features not only some serviceable songs ("Laundromat Monday") but an all-instrumental side consisting of three pieces. The new songs are themselves essentially mental movies. "Heart of Ice" suggests the beyond-the-grave scenes of Resurrection, a wandering, delicately constructed progression of elusive melodic fragments leading to a brief, ethereal chorus that, in response to "The Verdict," seems to fantasize "what happens when we die": "Take a knife/Cut out this heart of ice/Hold it high/Walk into the sun."

And "Loisaida," which opens side two, is a musical portrait of New York's Lower East Side that is beautiful and cinematic in a way similar to Pat Metheny's sidelong composition "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls." At first, I thought the horns were much too romantic and majestic for a song called "Loisaida," but by chance I walked those mean streets one night with Body and Soul on the Walkman, and the piece seemed much more elegiac, thrilling and haunted than it had at home. Shadowy piano figures, a menacing touch of dissonance, the flare of a traffic light, a resolving harmony of pedestrians, papers blowing down the street, more noise from more sources than you can take in all at once...then, at times, a surprising silence – again, gorgeous in its simplicity.

A few years ago, Joe Jackson made an album called Jumpin' Jive that laboriously attempted to recreate Forties small-band swing music for Eighties pub-rock audiences. If anyone wanted to hear Louis Jordan songs, though, he could easily go back to the real things. By now, Jackson has sufficiently absorbed his influences, channeled his enthusiasms into original work and charted a path for his future as an artist. So while the cover design for Body and Soul parodies the generic jazz reissue album (Jackson clutching a sax and a ciggie, eyes heavenward like Billie Holiday), right smack in the middle is his own name in big letters. Arrogant? You bet – here's a guy who has figured out who he is, and isn't afraid to say so. (RS 421)

DON SHEWEY