Since his heyday, the love god has largely been supplanted by the more ferociously athletic sex god, and pop-soul itself has been largely vanquished by hip-hop and rap. Jackson, who is 52, stepped back from the songs enough to imply that he was portraying a younger version of himself, and his good-humored self-recognition lent the show a playful edge. The implications are still clear enough to elicit cries of delight from an audience primed for vicarious bedroom thrills. Jackson’s patter is loaded with erotic innuendo, like other pop-soul singers of his generation, he shies away from raw explicitness to speak the soft-core language of romantic seduction. And “When I Fall in Love” became a drawn-out vocal serenade in which the word “never” was one of several elevated to special prominence. Song lyrics become a platform for vocal pyrotechnics that demonstrate an intensity of expression that trumps mere words. Jackson makes quasi-operatic, gospel-oriented vocal ornamentation the entree in his menu of techniques. Vandross, who died nearly four years ago and is the closest stylistic forerunner of Mr. The name that drew the biggest applause was that of Mr. The roster, which included Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, Teddy Pendergrass, Donny Hathaway, Peabo Bryson and James Ingram, ended with Nat King Cole, whose late-’50s recording of the song is probably the most famous and who exemplifies an older, more sedate pop-jazz crooning style. When Freddie Jackson introduced a slow-jam rendition of “When I Fall in Love” on Tuesday evening at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, he dutifully ticked off a list of R&B balladeers in the love-god tradition that carried him to pop stardom in the mid-1980s.
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