Amina Claudine Myers: In Touch (Novus/RCA)

INSTANT DANGER signal: the word that a musician associated with the freewheeling end of the jazz spectrum is messing with things like pop-song structures and vocals. Not that I've got anything against these people angling for big bucks — hell, I'd love it if they pulled it off — but the end result is usually shit music, either too straitjacketed by commercial formulas to be at all distinctive or taking so many liberties with the structure to avoid jazzster cries of "Sell-out!" that the whole point of utilizing an accessible framework gets lost in the shuffle. An English writer once said of Girlschool, we fully approve of their inherent right to make whatever kind of music they want to... we just don't like it very much.