The Moral the Merrier

"The black man has always known how to organize time in a joyous manner," says Oscar Brown Jr., black man and joyous organizer of time. "The rhythmic beat of black music is what has gotten us through all our troubles. White people can accomplish anything they can put to words. Black people have always been able to accomplish anything they can put to the beat."

Well, almost anything. In the new off-Broadway show Joy, Brown aims for an evening of theater, applying the beat to a collection of soulful soliloquies --on friendship, time, women, love, Adam and Eve and, of course, joy. Called a "musical come-together," Joy as a stage show has no more plot than a bagful of rainbows. But on a new RCA album, relieved of the need for action and reduced to pure sound, Joy becomes the sunniest original-cast LP of the year, an irresistible fantasia of blues, bossa nova, jazz and mild rock that tumbles beautifully out of living-room loudspeakers.

Savoring Joy only on LP rather than in the theater costs the listener a few visual delights, notably the pleasure of watching Jean Pace (Brown's wife) smile like the girls in Vogue wish they could and dance like the priestesses in Aida definitely should. But the LP blesses the ear with her Brown Baby and Afro Blue. It also offers Oscar and a Brazilian wizard named Sivuca (pianist, accordionist, guitarist, world's funkiest falsetto) singing and playing a small treasury of other inter-American gems.

Diatonic Devilry. The opening song, Time, shows the same kind of diatonic devilry that makes Hair such easy listening. What Is a Friend is an infectious, cross-rhythmed carnival samba that answers itself: "Someone I don't have to sham/Who can dig me as I am." On paper, A New Generation's lyrics look overly moralistic and underly lyrical: "A new generation is now on the scene . . . standing for right, demanding fair play for everyone." But combined with a beat that bounces all the way from Broadway to Brazil, the song becomes a pure case of the moral the merrier.

In a musical sense, Joy is not black. Brown owes as much to Gershwin, say, as Gershwin does to old blues roots. But what he consistently conveys is the life attitude of the black man who wants to be a man first and black second --not the other way around, as so often happens these days. Joy comes when whites understand and agree. Brown's ambition is that Joy will offer a common musical meeting place for black and white America. "Joy, not guns or hate, is the strongest force in the world," says Brown. "I want to use that force to disarm all the uptight people, the gun people, so that we can all get together." Joy.

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