Clive Davis once wrote that the secret of success in the record business is not to know what's coming but to know what's arrived, and the clearest imprimatur of having arrived is working with Quincy Jones. Jones has arranged, produced, composed, played trumpet and run record companies, but his greatest talent is as a collector, adopting and packaging the inspirations of others, legitimizing – and occasionally sanitizing – them in the process.

Jones's major accomplishment has been the records he produced for Michael Jackson: Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad, three of the most successful solo albums in the history of popular music. His genius was to preserve all of Jackson's most bizarre impulses; at the same time he counterpointed them with a studio craftiness that would have rendered less aberrational talents bland. To guard an artist's rough edges while sharpening the dull ones can often be an achievement of astonishing subtlety.

Astonishment is clearly the response that Back on the Block – Quincy Jones's stone-washed wardrobe of African American song styles – desires to evoke, and it often succeeds. But his sense of scale and relentless good taste guarantee that the astonishment one experiences is generally of the Epcot variety.

Back on the Block, Jones's first album since The Dude, in 1981, is an extravagant musical theme park, and its best numbers work better as rides than as records. Had this project been executed as a television special, there would be no room for carping. It offers three jaw-dropping set pieces, featuring rap, jazz and a cappella montages. In each, numerous giants of the forms contribute beautifully integrated performances. But on the rapping title cut – featuring Ice-T, Melle Mel, Big Daddy Kane and Kool Moe Dee – there are no samples, no scratches, no sexual brags. In short, "Back on the Block" is an abstraction, "the Rap Experience": big taste, no calories, none of the physical rub of a music that's all rub. You can believe that L.L. Cool J isn't on the scene to tell you about Tina Turner's "Big Ole Butt" – not at these prices.

"Jazz Corner of the World" juxtaposes more rap over a brilliant Bill Summers percussion groove and introduces licks from Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, et al. But it leads into a rendition of Joe Zawinul's "Birdland" that is a brassy pop instrumental with all the authenticity of a Trader Vic's mai tai. Most modest and bracing in its premise, and most successful, is "Wee B. Dooinit," the funkappella tapestry in which body sounds – tongue clucks, chest slaps and other noises, courtesy of Bobby McFerrin and others – and a snatch of vocoder are all the Master needs to assemble a persuasive dance hit.

Almost as good, but for the fact that it is not an A-plus song, is "The Secret Garden," Jones's aphrodisiac ballad featuring Al B. Sure!, El DeBarge, Barry White and James Ingram. The track is unpretentious, the principals seem engaged, amused, related. How unlike the jittery remake of "I'll Be Good to You," a Brothers Johnson cover and the album's best song, cast as a duet for Ray Charles and Chaka Khan. On that track the two singers reach for each other past the eagerly modern mechanized drums and the wash of strangely foregrounded "background" vocalists like dining lovebirds straining around an immense candelabrum.

Pop music tends to work best when it's about deep, familiar emotions expressed by individuals we feel we can come to know. Given Quincy Jones's P.T. Barnum approach, it's hard to see how Back on the Block could ever enter people's lives as more than sonic spectacle. Unlike Isaac Hayes or Daniel Lanois, to name but two, Jones is not a producer turned artist but a producer as artist. He is still collecting and assembling the work of others, so in place of the personal we get the conceptual. These are not songs to fall in love, march or cry to.

This record won't touch people like "Billie Jean" or even Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" (which Jones also produced). But Back on the Block certainly won't be forgotten at Grammy time. Whatever your view of the Grammys, that should tell you exactly what you need to know. (RS 571)

DAVITT SIGERSON