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.
Clarke'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
Clarke 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
rock-style mix, on
"The Streets of Philadelphia." Yet even the talented
Clarke 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
![1967 [1996]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0076605221928_p0_v2_s90x140.jpg "1967 [1996]")
