Jon Lucien, 65, songwriter, smooth-jazz ballad singer

WASHINGTON -- Jon Lucien, a singer and songwriter of ultra-romantic ballads whose recordings found a broad audience on smooth-jazz radio stations in the 1990s, died Aug. 18 at Florida Hospital in Orlando, near his home in Kissimmee. He had respiratory failure and complications after kidney surgery. He was 65.

Mr. Lucien was a forerunner of the melange of sounds dubbed fusion. His melodic and rhythmic influences ranged from his native Caribbean -- calypso, in particular -- to the beats of jazz, bossa nova, soul, and R&B.

Layered above this musical stew was a formidable baritone in the mold of Luther Vandross that specialized in lyrics of everlasting love. This preference was highlighted in songs he wrote, including "Lady Love" and "Rashida." His fans were also enamored of his version of Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Dindi."

Mr. Lucien was never considered a commercially successful performer. Critics were often unkind to his deep, caressing style backed by prolific stringwork.

"Macho clothed in velvet" was how his appearance at Newport Jazz Festival in 1975 was marketed. "Affectation clothed in rhetoric," reviewer John Rockwell wrote after the show.

The disco craze, combined with Mr. Lucien's cocaine habit and other personal problems, all but cemented his demise.

He returned to the Caribbean, where he worked to recover his health, and he reappeared on the US musical scene in 1991. He caught on with enough radio play to ensure continued demand in concerts and clubs worldwide.

He was also said to have a particularly strong following in England among acid-jazz fans and soul revivalists who enjoyed his early music.

Mr. Lucien embraced what he thought was his music's highest quality. "I would say that my sound is a romantic sound," he told an interviewer in 1997. "It's water. It's ocean. It's tranquility."

Lucien Harrigan was born in Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. Billy Harrigan, as he was known, was raised in St. Thomas by his blind, guitar-playing father and became a self-taught pianist, guitarist, and bassist.

At 19, he came to the United States to sing at a Catskills Mountains resort in Upstate New York.

Renaming himself Jon Marcus Lucien, he worked at the fringes of entertainment, performing in commercial jingles and also at bar mitzvahs and weddings on Long Island. One wedding guest was an RCA music producer who gave Mr. Lucien his card.

The result was his 1970 debut album "I Am Now," followed by two more for the RCA label, "Rashida" and "Mind's Eye." None sold particularly well. Subsequent albums for CBS, "Song for My Lady" and "Premonition," also failed to boost his popularity, despite top-notch arrangements and his covers of songs by established composers such as Herbie Hancock and Jobim.

Mr. Lucien spoke of his disillusionment with the pop-music industry in the late 1970s. He was married and divorced three times, and in 1980 a baby girl from his third marriage drowned in a pool. He developed a cocaine habit that lasted a decade.

"The truth is, I was scared of the business," he told Essence magazine in 1991. "By the time I made my fifth album, I began to realize that I was doing all the music and coming up with all the ideas. Not that I'm in dire need of attention, but I should've been getting the producer credit. I just thought, I've got to get outta here."

Settling in St. Thomas and then Puerto Rico, he struggled with his health. He got married for the fourth and final time in 1988, to Delesa Williams, and slowly reentered the mainstream music business.

In 1996, his teenage daughter from his third marriage, Dalila, was a passenger on TWA Flight 800 when it exploded and crashed off Long Island. Mr. Lucien said he staved off depression by throwing himself into work. He dedicated his 1997 album, "Endless is Love," to the plane's passengers, which also included the wife of saxophonist Wayne Shorter (Mr. Lucien's onetime brother-in-law).

"That was a heavy lesson," Mr. Lucien told the New York Amsterdam News. "All that I had was my music and my prayers."

In recent years, he made four albums for his own Sugar Apple Music label and completed a collection that included Christian hymns.

He leaves his wife, of Kissimmee; one daughter; two sons; three brothers; two sisters; and two grandchildren.