Masters Still Eric Clapton’s, Aretha Franklin’s New Cds Modern Yet True To Roots

Eric Clapton “Pilgrim” (Duck/Reprise)

Aretha Franklin “A Rose Is Still a Rose” (Arista)

Standing at the summit of their profession, Eric Clapton and Aretha Franklin are acknowledged masters.

Clapton is a blues guitarist without match - and an underrated singer with a Midas pop touch.

Franklin is the Queen of Soul who can belt with the Blues Brothers one minute, then sing an aria with a classical orchestra the next, as she did on the recent Grammy Awards show.

Clapton, 53, and Franklin, 55, both have new albums out. They both share traits other than longevity and virtuosity. While staying in touch with their roots, they’ve also kept up with modern times, which Clapton has done by working with Babyface and Franklin by working with Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs.

Each of the new discs - Clapton’s “Pilgrim” and Franklin’s “A Rose Is Still a Rose” - will sound right at home on contemporary hit radio. Each is girded by a drum-programmed, hip-hop sound, but not at the expense of the human touch. Clapton continues to improve as a gentlemanly singer baring his inner soul, while Franklin, having quit smoking, has rediscovered a high vocal range that makes her soulful excursions even more electrifying than usual.

Neither artist is suffering from complacency - and neither has suffered any lessening of skill.

Clapton has the upper hand this time, however, because his album is so unforgettably personal as well as more consistently brilliant. It is rare to see a mainstream artist display such heart-wrenching sensitivity. Clapton sings several songs about his 4-year-old son, Conor, who accidentally fell to his death from an open 53rd-floor skyscraper window in Manhattan in 1991.

A similar music-as-healing tone pervaded Clapton’s previous hit about Conor, “Tears in Heaven,” but the new album goes deeper in this therapeutic direction. Clapton has suffered other tragedies, such as having his agent and tour manager killed in the same helicopter crash that took his friend Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990, after Vaughan and he had played on stage that night in Wisconsin. Then there was the reported drug-relapse death three years ago of former girlfriend Allie Ormsby Gore after Clapton, a former drug addict, had helped her through rehab.

Yet these tragedies have been alchemized into a stately, elegant music in which Clapton’s improved singing ability is most apparent. It’s hard to believe that he once had to be coaxed into singing during his guitar-god days in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But he’s learned the vocal art well - and he’s never sung with more open-hearted skill than on the new single “My Father’s Eyes,” about watching his “seedling” son grow and realizing how much Clapton needed to connect with his own father, whom he never met.

Without a doubt, this is one of the best records of Clapton’s career.

And the same can be said for Franklin, though hers is more of a producer’s album and most of the songs were written for her. Still, the Queen of Soul is back in a royal posture, which hasn’t always been true of her records in the past decade, which have seen hit-or-miss music and declining sales.

The new “A Rose Is Still a Rose,” however, should reverse that trend. It’s her first studio album in six years (and her 49th overall). The hip-hoppy title track is a sister-to-sister meditation about survival, penned and produced by Lauryn Hill of the Fugees.

Puff Daddy’s “Never Leave You Again” is transformed with a jazz scat. Jermaine Dupri’s “Here We Go Again” finds Aretha sassily jabbing at a lover, “Stop wasting my time.”

The cavalcade of producers keeps coming. Narada Michael Walden, who produced Franklin’s prior hit, “Freeway of Love,” returns for “How Many Times,” about a woman trying to get free of an imprisoning romance. And other hot producers, Dallas Austin and Michael J. Powell, get even more of a contemporary feel from the rejuvenated Franklin, who appears ready to retain her Queen of Soul credentials until well into the next millennium.