The haunting “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and emotion-charged “Killing Me Softly With His Song” made Roberta Flack one of the most successful female R&B singers of the early-mid ‘70s. Yet those massive chart hits — supplemented by successful duets like “Where Is the Love” and “Feel Like Making Love” with friend/Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway — were rooted in a dignity and grace that somehow rose above the light jazz label applied to them in an era churning with energetic soul and funk. And then just as soul morphed into disco, Flack also found the very gentle, yet sophisticated balladry she’d built her career around becoming a focal point of pop music in general. Abetted by producers/Atlantic Records r&b fixtures Gene McDaniels and Ahmet Ertegun, she took that opportunity to produce this richly textured, highly polished album of smooth, jazz-inflected soul. If, as some have suggested, it tends to play more directly to the adult contemporary market that embraced Flack’s music with a passion, it’s hardly an artistic compromise, especially anchored by the presence of Hathaway again on the album’s buoyant hit, “The Closer I Get to You” and such other highlights as the patent elegance  of “25th of September” and “Love is the Healing,” or the contrasting, disco-lite opener, “Why Don’t You Move In With Me.”