Steve Winwood
Arc of a Diver

The second chapter in a brilliant solo career, "Arc of a Diver," from 1980 (curiously released on December 31st of that year), is an essay in musical savoir faire, the result of years of accumulated experience in music. Steve Winwood records it in his home and plays all the instruments, as well as singing: what emerges are seven masterful tracks amounting to 40 minutes of music that ideally bridge the soul of the '70s with intriguing previews of the more sophisticated pop-rock of the newly begun decade.

Here's Steve Winwood, from Birmingham, England, raised on sturdy doses of rhythm and blues. As a boy, he played Hammond organ and guitar for the Americans who disembarked in Albion, B.B. King and Chuck Berry to name two. By the late '60s, he can boast friendships and collaborations with luminaries like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker. He's not even twenty when he forms Traffic, the band behind "Mr. Fantasy" and "John Barleycorn Must Die," and not yet thirty when his first, self-titled, solo album is released.

In this "Arc of a Diver" (a strange and suggestive image: the arc formed by a diver's body), the warm voice of Winwood along with keyboards are the protagonists, used in various expressive modes, both as harmonic support and foregrounded in solos. This is the stylistic hallmark, for example, of the opening track "While You See A Chance," a hit that brought Steve Winwood to general attention when the album was released, and today can rightly be called a classic, still played on the radio.

But in all the tracks there is a happy synthesis between the control over expressive means and the ability to give space to inspiration and inventiveness: in the measured title track, or in the sophisticated yet sensual sounds of "Spanish Dancer." The entire album is a successful compendium of Steve Winwood's talent in creating direct and free music, brimming with vitality.