"Jackie Wilson said it was reet petite," he shouts for openers, and soon has me believing that "I'm in heaven when you smile" says as much about the temporal and the eternal as anything in Yeats. "Listen to the lion," he advises later, referring to that lovely frightening beast inside each of us, and midway through the eleven-minute cut he lets the lion out, moaning and roaring and growling and stuttering in a scat extension that would do Leon Thomas proud. The point being that words--which on this album are as uneven as the tunes--sometimes say less than voices. Amen. A-