Reviews: New on CD

Jamie Foxx. Best Night of My Life." J.

On film, Jamie Foxx is a performer of wide range, a gifted mimic and an Oscar winner. In music, though, he plays a naif: eager second stringer, shameless trend chaser, just happy to be allowed on the field.

"Best Night of My Life" is his fourth album, which might say as much about his appetite to play the game as about his popularity. (His last two albums have been certified platinum.) Even more so than its predecessors, "Best Night" is a reasonable facsimile of the genre around him, and a deeply satisfying one at that: It's Foxx's best album to date.

Throughout are oodles of almost-right sonic reproductions of the sort made for film and TV by hired guns when the soundtrack calls for "party R&B" or "Southern bounce." Foxx can hire the best producers, though, and this album's digital, dance-oriented R&B isn't a far cry from "Last Train to Paris," the recent album by Diddy-Dirty Money. On "Winner" there's even some of the pseudo rapping that Justin Timberlake has been squeezing out of his system of late.

It's good that Timberlake doesn't operate at full throttle, because this album's successes often come in spite of Foxx, who sings as if he were delivering lines for the camera: declarative, extra literal, sharp at the edges. "Shorty, you drinking on that martini," he sings on the title track, "I wanna see you in a bikini."

Just as he channeled Ray Charles so assiduously on-screen, Foxx takes on other roles here. On "Freak" he refers to Michael Jackson as the producers Danja and Rico Love do their best "Thriller" impression. Most of the rest of the time, he coats himself in Auto-Tune, as if he didn't quite trust his virtues as a singer, which in fairness to Foxx, are ample.

Even more oddly, for someone so clearly invested in the genre's history and in its technical specifics, he has very little interest in R&B's potential range of feeling. Only "Fall for Your Type," written with and featuring the emotional savant Drake, is concerned with something beyond alcohol spilling out of cups and clothes dropping on the floor. That's behavior that other singers know breeds regret but that Foxx sounds excited to try.

- Jon Caramanica

c. New York Times News Service

Ciara. "Basic Instinct." LaFace/Jive

Celebrity, commodity, singer, sex object, cyborg - Ciara just about fuses all of them on "Basic Instinct," her fourth studio album. Her breathy voice is the candy in the machines she runs with her producers: primarily Tricky Stewart and The-Dream, who worked on seven of the 11 tracks. "Basic Instinct" has a lighter, less cluttered sound than her 2009 album, "Fantasy Ride." It harks back to the electronic austerity of her 2004 debut CD, "Goodies," which may be why Ciara starts the album promising that she's "back on my job, and back up in my track."

The songs pulse with a twitchy minimalism. "Speechless" never deviates from an underlying two-bar, three-chord vamp, but its synthetic orchestrations vary unpredictably while Ciara's voice curls around the repeating chords. Her singing is tersely percussive on songs like "Gimme Dat," while it's sustained and caressing in "I Run It" and "You Can Get It."

Yet Ciara comes across more as a follower than as a leader.

Although Ciara shares songwriting credit throughout the album, she stays remote as she strikes her conventional poses. Her voice, treated on previous albums as a close, intimate whisper, is now more guarded, receding into the mix so that it's as much an electronic element as the synthesizers are. For "Basic Instinct," her motto might as well be "nothing personal."

- Jon Pareles

c. New York Times News Service

Charles Lloyd Quartet. "Mirror." ECM

Here's an extremely fine jazz album you just might have missed. Charles Lloyd, 72, a tenor saxophonist and flutist, has been spinning yarns lately with a bright, young rhythm section, featuring Jason Moran on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums. The group made its recorded debut with a rollicking live album, "Rabo de Nube" (ECM), in 2008. "Mirror," released in September, is the follow-up, a proper studio effort aglow with watchful calm.

The album's repertory leans toward ballads, with well-worn jazz standards brushing up against deep spirituals. About a third of the songs, including a pastoral original called "Desolation Sound," can also be found elsewhere in the recent Lloyd discography.

Lloyd has strong, distinctive company here. Moran, best known as a bandleader - his working trio, the Bandwagon, released the consensus-pick Jazz Album of 2010 - has also been maturing as a sideman.

Lloyd stands at the center of the swirl, on the serenely swinging title track as on a version of Brian Wilson's "Caroline, No," communicating a great range of human emotion with his zephyr-like phrasing and nearly gossamer tone.

- Nate Chinen

c. New York Times News Service

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