Giving R&B; a New Kind of R-e-s-p-e-c-t : There's a new kind of sister act as today's black female artists are stretching the boundaries of soul music. (Forget about tradition.)

By Richard Cromelin

March 19, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Richard Cromelin writes about pop music for Calendar</i>

Onstage at LunaPark in West Hollywood, the diminutive, short-haired Dionne Farris resembles an elfin creature as she crouches and traces shapes in the air with her fingers in response to her band’s music, an eclectic blend that spins out in several directions from its R&B; foundation.

Opening the soul ballad “Passion,” Farris floats her voice atop warm currents of airy, folk-style guitar picking. “Now the sky has opened, there are no limits to this,” she sings with an elegance and suppleness that evoke Marvin Gaye’s sultry side.

As her voice slides into an upper register, the music gradually tightens around the core melody, and suddenly a swoop of guitar and a pounding of snare drum suck the sound into a series of crushing rock riffs that would do Jimmy Page proud.

It’s a casually triumphant moment, and one that’s typical of the young singer’s crusade to short-circuit expectations of what a black female singer with a black band should be. It’s a long way from the tradition that has dominated the genre ever since Aretha Franklin stormed the charts in 1967 with the anguished lament “I Never Loved a Man.”

In their storied Atlantic Records hits, Franklin and producer Jerry Wexler wrote the scripture of soul: a primal sense of hurt steeped in the blues, a sophisticated, complex web of emotions caressed, restrained, then released in gospel-fired vocal embellishments.

From disco divas to funk goddesses to Whitney Houston, Anita Baker and Mary J. Blige, the music has rarely ventured far from that blueprint during the last 30 years.

But now, with full r-e-s-p-e-c-t to Lady Soul, a new breed of female R&B; artists has emerged to challenge the standard. By crossing long-drawn stylistic boundaries, Farris and such other young performers as Neneh Cherry and Me’Shell NdegeOcello are expanding, enriching and revitalizing that root tradition. In the process, they hope, they’re shaking up the music business’s conception of black music and its audience.

Farris’ 1994 debut album, “Wild Seed--Wild Flower,” ranges from hard rock to traditional pop to folk to reggae to funk to psychedelia, forming a vibrant, consistently surprising setting for her soaring voice. Her songs address personal and social issues with spiritual and philosophical overtones.

NdegeOcello earned four Grammy nominations this year--for her album “Plantation Lullabies,” a forceful, eccentric hybrid of hip-hop and soul, for her song “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night)” and for her pairing with heartland rocker John Mellencamp on his remake of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night.”

Other names--Joi, Carleen Anderson--are also edging into the ring.

“I think this is the music that’s coming,” says Randy Jackson, the Columbia Records vice president of artists and repertoire who signed Farris and produced part of her album. “I think it expands the boundaries of black, alternative or whatever genre you want to think that they’re in. You’re going to see a lot more people do this. I think this is the beginning of a new era.

“These are (artists) that are probably around the same age and they’ve probably had some of the same experiences.

“I think it’s just saying, ‘OK, I’m not gonna be Whitney Houston, I don’t really want to be Regina Belle, I don’t want to be Brandy or Mary J. Blige. I may be a little bit of all of that, but where do I fit in?’ ”

Says Farris: “I think people are getting sick of a cookie-cutter situation. There were like 50, 60 groups in the ‘50s and ‘60s and none of them sounded alike--as soon as they came on the radio you knew who it was.

“My friends listen to the radio now and they say, ‘Man, everybody sounds alike.’ I think they’re saying, ‘I’m tired of it, I want people to be individuals.’ ”

W hile this new creative wave has drawn its share of criti cal attention, separate interviews with three of its principal figures suggest that it’s not an easy sell when the music and radio industries prefer clearly marked packages.

Farris is only 26, but she’s already done her share of head-butting with prospective managers and label executives who liked her abilities but wanted to rein in her ambition.

Only now, four months after her album’s release, is she finding some commercial success. Her first single, the rock-edged “I Know,” is nearing the Top 10 on the national pop charts, and its success has brought the album into the Top 200 for the first time.

Soul music was the soundtrack for Farris’ childhood in Plainfield, N.J.--’70s staples such as Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and Lou Rawls. As a teen-ager, Farris was a big Diana Ross fan, and that led her to Billie Holiday. Her high school years also brought her in touch with mainstream pop radio--everything from the Police and Air Supply to oldies such as Led Zeppelin.

“I was always open, and still am, to all types of music,” says the small, intense singer, sitting in the restaurant at LunaPark a few hours before her show. “If it makes me feel good, gives me some kind of energy, why not?”

Farris, a natural extrovert, nurtured her skills singing in school choirs, and eventually tried to collaborate with other musicians. Getting nowhere and feeling frustrated, she moved to Atlanta, where she hooked up with the rap group Arrested Development. Her poignant, high wail is one of the hallmarks of its Grammy-winning 1991 hit “Tennessee.”

But she was still determined to deliver her own vision, spurred by genre-benders such as Prince, Living Colour, Seal, Lenny Kravitz and Tracy Chapman. She left Arrested Development and made demos of her eclectic songs, then stumbled into the record business’s maze of pigeonholes.

“ ‘OK, what is this, what do we do?’ ” she recalls of labels’ initial reactions. “It was not so easily categorized. They’d say, ‘You know, that’s gonna be a little far-fetched,’ or ‘You know, you’re a black woman and you really can’t do that. . . . Look, just do the R&B; now, then you can go into all the other stuff you want to do. But right now you need to establish yourself.’ ”

Farris’ eyes flash with defiance.

“I’m not gonna give up my integrity just to make a record.”

Neneh Cherry, 30, whose sassy 1988 hit “Buffalo Stance” was a foreshock of the current surge of border-crossing, is cheering on her successors as she records a new album at her home in Spain.

“There’s a lot of artists that do the more sort of straight stuff, that you can say, ‘This is R&B;, this is rap,’ ” she says. “There are so many people that do that really well, I sort of feel that if you’re coming from another place it’s your responsibility to get on and say what you’re gonna say without watering it down too much.

“I think that Me’Shell and a lot of the artists that are coming out and breaking new ground, if you want to call it that, have got sort of miscellaneous backgrounds, and I think that’s just something that tends to happen.”

In Cherry’s case, it seems inevitable: The daughter of an African musician father and a Swedish artist mother who later married jazz musician Don Cherry, she spent much of her youth in New York’s culture-blending environment.

When she moved to London, she plunged into a music scene that valued wild juxtapositions, starting as a member of the punk-funk-jazz group Rip Rig & Panic before emerging as a solo force with her soul, pop, hip-hop hybrid.

While her influences were diverse, female role models were always special.

“I was always really moved by someone like Chaka Khan,” she says. “When I was growing up, she just kind of oozed something, like I’m here! Women that write, like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Women in music like Janis Joplin. Alice Coltrane. Roxanne Shante. There were always people around. What do they have in common? It’s an eternal resilience.”

NdegeOcello’s father was also a jazz musician, and she studied jazz, drama and other disciplines at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington. In her song “I’m Diggin’ You (Like an Old Soul Record),” she likens the feelings aroused by a lover to those associated with, well, old soul records.

“My mother was a big fan of Aretha Franklin, so soul music was important,” says NdegeOcello, 26, sitting at the bar recently after an afternoon sound check with her band at the House of Blues. “There was a radio station . . . they’d play a lot of Isaac Hayes to Sly Stone to Curtis Mayfield. Soul music.

“I consider myself a hip-hop child with old-fashioned values. I like how hip-hop is patched and put together, but I still like writing my own music. I just wanted to do what was natural. I liked rock and I liked funk and I liked doin’ ballads. . . . I wanted to make music that was musical and versatile.”

W hy have several like-mind ed artists emerged at the same time?

“I just want to attribute it to the simple fact that I think people’s minds are opening up,” Farris says.

Says Cherry: “I think that a lot of people have struggled for a long time with record companies and have kind of taken the ball in their own court and got on with things regardless. I think by demanding attention like that, things happen. And then that rolls over, like dominoes, and other people are like, ‘Wow, I can do this too.’ ”

Still, obstacles persist.

Farris’ success is dampened by the fact that it has been sparked by pop Top 40 or “contemporary hits” radio, rather than black-music stations, seemingly the natural home for music with so many black music strands in its weave.

“I think that black radio just hasn’t expanded its boundaries,” says one label executive, who asked not to be identified. “In a way it’s kind of segregated itself. . . . The minds of the programmers just aren’t open. They don’t think that black people as a whole are ready to accept anything other than Snoop and Dre.”

But there are signs of progress. KJLH-FM (102.3), L.A.’s leading “adult” R&B; station, has started playing Farris’ sultry, laid-back “11th Hour,” after passing on “I Know.”

“I think the bottom line is the sound,” says KJLH music director Jeff Gill. “Just because an artist is black doesn’t mean their music fits the R&B; format. Ray Charles made country songs. We’re not going to play Ray Charles country songs just because he’s a black artist. If he’s got a song that fits what this format is, then we’ll play it.”

While Farris is happy that her music has reached the mainstream, she wants it to cut the other way too.

“I hope that urban radio will be into it as well. Because I feel like this is black music. . . . For me and my black community, I felt like we were cutting ourselves out of everything else by saying that this little narrow thing is what black music is.”

Says Cherry: “I think that it’s important for the black community of artists that there’s an area where people are looking beyond the things that a black singer or musician is expected to do. . . .

“It’s important that people’s minds are opened to the fact that we’re all people. We’re all gonna sometimes meet on mutual ground and do things together. . . . So it’s important to melt the barriers.”