John Legend, 'Once Again' in His Own Good Time

Behold the beauty of the fluegelhorn, John Legend insists, as the old instrument makes a rare contemporary-pop cameo on Legend's exceptional new album, "Once Again."

It appears on "Maxine's Interlude," which is not to be confused with "Maxine" itself: The latter song is the one that features the vintage Stevie Wonder keyboard vamps and a bossa nova groove.

There may not be a more anachronistic hitmaker in modern R&B than Legend, whose "Once Again" is among the genre's most audacious artistic statements of 2006, crafted by a 27-year-old singer, songwriter and pianist who seems to be growing increasingly immune to current trends. Which is a glorious thing.

Mostly eschewing state-of-the-art beats and arrangements, Legend and his sprawling team of collaborators -- led by executive producer Kanye West -- have created an ambitious pop-soul album that ignores genre boundaries to draw inspiration from a broad range of sources.

Some of them are obvious (Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke), but many are not: The album opens with "Save Room," a breezy love song that suggests Nat King Cole crooning a 1960s AM radio hit as drawn up by Burt Bacharach. (Or, as it were, by the old songwriters Buddy Buie and James Cobb Jr., whose '60s hit "Stormy" is sampled in "Save Room.") It's not the only time Bacharach's influence looms over Legend's elegant melodies and in some of the arrangements, as when a flute heralds the arrival of the chorus in "Another Again."

The album's most striking song is "Show Me," a hushed prayer on which Legend sings in the high, soaring style of the late rock singer Jeff Buckley. It's a breathtaking stylistic turn for Legend, a sanctified soul singer.

"Once Again" mostly focuses on amorous matters -- breakups, make-ups, groupies, etc. -- none better than the spare, stormy "Again." But the album closes with a political statement: "Coming Home," a piano ballad about a homesick soldier who questions the basis for war. "It's so strange to me, a new year, a new enemy," Legend sings. " . . . It seems the wars will never end." That song harks back to Gaye's classic Vietnam-era work, in both spirit and sound, right down to the use of wind instruments and strings.

Of course, Legend's aversion to making fully modernized music isn't totally new. On his 2004 debut, "Get Lifted," he came across like a soul traditionalist trapped in a hip-hop world. That was especially true on the breakout ballad "Ordinary People," a drumless song that featured nothing but Legend's gritty voice and graceful piano work.

Legend isn't completely stuck in the past. While there are no rap vocals on "Once Again" (Kanye and Snoop Dogg made cameos on "Get Lifted"), the singer still slips hip-hop vernacular into his lyrics. And the new album's producers also used occasional programmed drum loops and samples. Yet the results don't always suggest thoroughly modern times: Though the clever groupie anthem "Stereo" rides a swaggering boom-bap hip-hop beat and is probably the album's most of-the-moment song, the pleading "Each Day Gets Better" evokes vintage Motown via a Four Tops sample.

DOWNLOAD THESE : "Show Me," "Again," "Stereo"