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 mainstream. 's writing remains strong and his tastes remain unpredictable, veering into , music, acoustic , even in tandem with British rocker . 's excursion into is surprisingly and infectiously successful, thanks to a good bridge and 's galvanizingly funky work on the Yamaha electric grand piano (his finest moment with by far). The brief a wry salute from one master bassist to another ( died about six months before this album's release), is a cool acoustic breather for piano trio, and the eloquent can be detected, though nearly buried under the garish vocals and -style mix, on 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, deleted three of the original 15 tracks -- including at least one gem, the sizzling hard rocker -- 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