Stanley Clarke
stretches his muscles and comes up with a mostly impressive, polystylistic, star-studded double album (now on one CD) that gravitates ever closer to the
R&B
mainstream.
Clarke
's writing remains strong and his tastes remain unpredictable, veering into
rock
,
electronic
music, acoustic
jazz
, even
reggae
in tandem with British rocker
Jeff Beck
.
's excursion into
disco
"Just a Feeling,"
is surprisingly and infectiously successful, thanks to a good bridge and
George Duke
's galvanizingly funky work on the Yamaha electric grand piano (his finest moment with
by far). The brief
"Blues for Mingus,"
a wry salute from one master bassist to another (
Mingus
died about six months before this album's release), is a cool acoustic breather for piano trio, and the eloquent
Stan Getz
can be detected, though nearly buried under the garish vocals and
-style mix, on
"The Streets of Philadelphia."
Yet even the talented
in full creative flower couldn't quite fill a double set with new material, so he has a tendency to reprise some of his old memorable riffs a lot, and there are several energetic snapshots of his live band in action. In its zeal to get this two-LP set onto one disc,
Epic
deleted three of the original 15 tracks -- including at least one gem, the sizzling hard rocker
"All About"
-- and scrambled the order of the remaining tunes. Which is dumb, because the missing tracks only take up a bit less than 12 minutes of playing time, not enough to overload a 65-minute disc. Hunt for the double-LP version if you can still play vinyl. ~ Richard S. Ginell