Collas and Marquand drafted friends to moonlight on their debut, including singers Aurelio Valle (Calla), Carol C (Si Se), and Lady Tigra and TV on the Radio guitarist Jaleel Bunton. It may be premature to call the Handclap Band phenomenal -- the album is an uneven hodgepodge -- but it's certainly groovy, imaginative fun.

-- STEVE KLINGE

Philadelphia Inquirer

SONNY ROLLINS

Reel Life

Concord

*** ½

The title track here is a simple melody that could be a smooth-jazz children's song. But tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins rips a hole through it, turning it so much into an improviser's ball that one wonders how much the material matters to him.

The sense of surprise is a constant on this brief 1982 session, newly reissued on Concord. Rollins mixes it up with two wildly different guitarists, Bobby Broom and Yoshiaki Masuo. He's backed by the rock-solid bottom provided by his longtime electric bassist Bob Cranshaw and the super drummer Jack DeJohnette.

There's clearly a spin here to be commercial, as on the wildly happy Sonny's Side Up. But Rollins still finds cool things to say. He shows some growling authority on the Billy Strayhorn ballad My Little Brown Book, and his requisite calypso, long a constant in his recordings, here is called Rosita's Best Friend, making for a slinky romp.

It's not the heaviest session for the saxophone colossus, but Rollins can probably pull fiery lines from the comics.

-- KARL STARK

Philadelphia Inquirer

REGINA SPEKTOR

Far

Sire

*** ½

Regina Spektor traffics in cuteness as a form of alienation, a way of distinguishing her perceptions from the ''normal'' way of viewing things. The 29-year-old Jewish ''anti-folk'' star is a classic outsider: She emigrated from Moscow to the Bronx as a child, and from concert piano to pop during high school.

Now a cult performer whose songs frequently turn up in the background of prime-time television dramas, Spektor is a more daring artist than her quirky surfaces indicate. Her approach seems guileless and folk-artsy at first, but behind her odd vocal effects is the desire to break through the bonds of any one language, as her magic-realist lyrics seek to comprehend the human condition of not fitting in.

Far comes after the breakthrough success of 2006's Begin to Hope, and shows the effects of semi-stardom. Its songs are carefully polished by a cluster of A-list producers (including David Kahne, who helmed her last one, and Jeff Lynne, of ELO/Traveling Wilburys fame). The fables and fantasy lives they depict are rendered in fairly understandable terms. Yet Far still shows the range that Spektor can travel within her dreamy world.

Sometimes, here, she's a bit obvious. Going cyborg in Machine, Spektor puts on a robot voice; in Dance Anthem of the '80s she basically rewrites a B-52's song.

When she's too straightforward, Spektor's writing can be a touch smug, finding easy poignancy in the story of a lost wallet or reminding cynics that ``no one laughs at God in a hospital.''

She's more on target when she's more ambiguous -- intertwining an ascendant vocal line with piano arpeggios to describe a local mystery in Genius Next Door, or playing around with the creation myth on the slowly building Blue Lips. Best of all is Eet, a meditation on how language relates to memory that's as literary as it is nonsensical.

Somebody's going to use this song in a commercial soon, playing it behind a slow-motion shot of flowers opening up. It deserves better. It's not just cute.

-- ANN POWERS

Los Angeles Times Service

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