Private Life: The Compass Point Sessions.

Decades before alternative divas became a dime a dozen, Miss Grace Jones pioneered an attitude-intensive, gender-twisting, gay-rifle persona that mixed high style and subversive substance. From "I Need a Man" onward, Grace epitomized disco-wave queer sensibility at a time when nearly all dance music required you to leave your brains at the coat check. She resembled the fiercest of dykes while embodying the desires and dreams of gay men--a butch's butch who could also work a runway, a button pusher dismissed as a no-talent clothes-hanger who nevertheless worked with top musical and visual artists. In the late '70s and early '80s, in-your-face Grace was fabulousness itself.

It's been nearly a decade since she made a great record (the remix of "Love on Top of Love," not the album from which it came, her final one and only dud). Since then, she's toured in The Wiz, returned to the gay club circuit, which first embraced her, and released a few uncharacteristically forgettable singles. But her music lives on, both as source material (LL Cool J lifted a huge chunk of Grace's "My Jamaican Guy" for his soft-core MTV hit "Doin' It," while dance hall reggae queen Patra covered "Pull Up to the Bumper") and as party tape standbys for homos everywhere. Yet her catalog remains a shambles: Four of her albums are unavailable on CD, while her illusive, superior 12-inch mixes remain rarities.

Private Life addresses part of the problem while sidestepping the rest. Its two long-play CDs focus almost exclusively on Grace's collaborations with reggae masters Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare: 1980's Warm Leatherette, 1981's Nightclubbing, and 1982's Living My Life. While leaving off only five tracks from that trilogy, the collection includes plenty of extended versions, a couple of B sides, a pair of unreleased dub mixes, and two outtakes, plus the import-only 12-inch mix of 1985's "Slave to the Rhythm" (an unrelated. lavish milestone).

Released in the wake of the orchestral disco boom but before synthesizers completely took over the dance floor, these tracks were both revolutionary and rooted in tradition. Employing standard rock-funk instrumentation while manipulating the sonics in the style of Jamaican dub and European electronics, Sly and Robbie created grooves that were both raw and refined, vigorously physical yet ethereal, while Grace's commanding sing-speak, obviously international in its pronunciation and timing, heightened the crystal cool drama. It's pretty amazing that one person would dare to cover Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, Bill Withers, the Normal, the Police, Flash in the Pan, Smokey Robinson, the Pretenders, Tom Petty, Joy Division, and Johnny Cash--much less make them her own. But this is the same Grace who scored her biggest hit with the self-penned "Bumper," which celebrated the joys of anal sex just before we knew its dangers.

One could quibble about the omission of the most radical extensions (in particular, Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan's far more tuneful rearrangement of "Feel Up"). And long-standing Grace fans will wonder why this period gets its second CD treatment, while two of her earlier disco-era LPs have never been issued on CD in America and are now unavailable worldwide. (Apparently, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell doesn't like them.) But the sound quality of the remastering here blows away all previous incarnations, and, after all, this is Grace at her most graceful. And that ain't no disgrace.