Patrice Rushen’s story is one of those music industry stories that makes you wonder how many others went the same way. She arrived as a jazz prodigy in the early 1970s, a teenager from Los Angeles who outplayed professionals at the Monterey Jazz Festival and had critics reaching for superlatives before she had cut a single studio record. Then she crossed over into R&B and pop, wrote and performed some of the most elegantly constructed music of the 1980s, and spent decades doing exactly what she wanted to do, including work as a composer, musical director, and a multi-decade run as the first woman and first Black music director of the Emmy Awards telecast.

Straight From the Heart, released this week on Fantasy, is her first solo album in twenty years. At 70, Rushen is doing what she has always done: refusing to fit neatly into any single genre and refusing to make it easy on the listener in the best way possible.

The album moves through jazz, funk, pop, and soul without treating any of those transitions as a dramatic pivot. Rushen’s piano playing remains extraordinary, a reminder that before the songs and the hits and the production credits, there was a teenager who played keyboard in a way that stopped people dead. That technical foundation underpins everything here, but it never becomes a performance of technique. The music breathes.

The album opens with a statement of intent: warm, layered, unhurried. Rushen is not coming back from anywhere; she has simply decided to make a record, and that quiet confidence shapes the whole thing. There are moments where the production leans into a glossier register than necessary, and a few tracks that feel like they are giving the audience exactly what they expect rather than pushing into anything unexpected. But those are minor complaints against an album that largely justifies its existence every time the piano enters.

If you know Rushen’s name primarily through “Forget Me Nots” or “Feels So Real,” this album is a good reason to go back further. If you already know the Fantasy-era records, this is a welcome continuation of a career that has never needed to be revived because it never really stopped.

At twenty years since her last solo release, Straight From the Heart sounds less like a comeback and more like a musician who simply had something to say and finally said it. That is about as good a reason to make a record as there is.