Christmas albums are the wild cards in a pop artist's career. Because they're not expected to yield hit singles, these projects are free from the usual commercial pressures from record companies, which are happy just to have a perennial cash cow. Thus liberated, artists have a chance (if they're smart enough to seize it) to make a more personal, more instinctual record. There's no better example than Ledisi's terrific new disc, "It's Christmas."

On her major-label debut last year, "Lost & Found," Ledisi sounded like a major R&B singer straitjacketed by the genre's formulas. Forced to cope with unbending, programmed beats and synths, the big-voiced soprano overcompensated by piling needless embellishment upon needless embellishment. On "It's Christmas," by contrast, she works with live musicians and noticeably relaxes into the greasy grooves. She lets out her inner Mavis Staples.

The album opens with "I'll Go," a duet with D.C. gospel legend Richard Smallwood, and that nod to Ledisi's roots in church explains her fiery gospel-soul vocal on "Children Go Where I Send Thee." This time her embellishments never seem gratuitous but seem to erupt spontaneously from her excitement over the song and the funky band behind her. She swoons over strings on a remake of the Jackson 5's "Give Love on Christmas Day," trades bluesy phrases with Keb' Mo' on the Charles Brown classic "Please Come Home for Christmas" and lends a New Orleans second-line feel to her original "Be There for Christmas."

--Geoffrey Himes, Weekend (Dec. 19, 2008)