Distance is the difference between Babyface, the reigning king of black pop, and Omar Lye Fook, the British soul singer who should soon be giving Babyface nightmares. On the sumptuous singles he produces for himself and others, Babyface glorifies every amorous intention from afar – even when he's in the thick of it, he sounds like a play-by-play guy phoning in the details.

Omar plunges his listeners right into the master bedroom on For Pleasure, his debut album. He sings in a taut falsetto on "Confection," countering one lover's challenge with another: "Just make sure that you are ready, 'cause we are gonna be here for a while." Omar's songs locate the tugs and pulls and poignancy of the everyday without stooping to cliché, and their various earthbound themes – the importance of self-esteem, post-breakup survival, the problems of holding down a job – resonate more compellingly than the nonstop-love utopian escapism found on hundreds of hits.

Omar is the Wynton Marsalis of soul, a 25-year-old multi-instrumentalist with a daunting command of rhythm & blues history and a romantic's sense of melody besides. He sings carefree scat lines over tightly wound rhythm beds that suggest Sly and the Family Stone. He breaks up repetitive acid-jazz loops with the adventurous, harmonically rich song structure of vintage Motown. He slaps a Pips-style "ohh-shoo-la-la" onto a hip-hop pulse, and both benefit from the allusion. He looks for ways to connect old and new – "Outside," a collaboration with Motown legend Lamont Dozier, threads together everything from sweet Philly-soul strings to the crisp punctuation of the Black-byrds' "Rock Creek Park" era and P-Funk's rhythmic momentum. And rather than subject his listeners to the obligatory production-number ballad, Omar offers a gentle, fragile meditation, "Little Boy," that owes more to Sarah Vaughan than to Whitney Houston.

Unlike Marsalis, Omar is never particularly doctrinaire about his musical reserves. He's resurrecting some time-honored ideas and not just trying to woo the nostalgia vote. In Omar's world every little inflection signifies, and no appropriation is careless. What impresses isn't the thoroughness of his scholarship but the intensity of his spirit. (RS 710)

TOM MOON