**** Oscar Brown Jr.

SIN AND SOUL

(Columbia Legacy)

This welcome reissue originally marked the debut of a virtual folk hero, the most poignant portraitist of black life in song since Fats Waller. Brown's masterful settings of Nat Adderley's "Work Song," Bobby Timmons's "Dat Dere," and Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue" made waves in 1961, and they survive as classics of American culture. He becomes the characters in his songs, each a mini-drama with shifting points of view; his pungent one-liners aren't funny so much as they are profound and straight from the heart.

Brown also plays cannily with song structure. "Sleepy" is a sleeper, all right, with cross rhymes and stop times. Tight sextet charts -- not really jazzy -- are played flawlessly by prime studio jazzmen, including trumpeter Joe Wilder and bassist George Duvivier. There's not much in the way of solos -- Brown's the show. This CD's outtakes from Brown's musical Kicks & Co., the Faust myth gone Harlem, add history but are not essential.

-- Fred Bouchard