In 1963 Steve Winwood joined guitarist Spencer Davis to form the Spencer Davis Group. Winwood eventually tired of the tight pop-single format. Accordingly, he left the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form Traffic with guitarist Dave Mason, horn player Chris Wood, and drummer Jim Capaldi, all of whom had played on ‘Gimme Some Lovin’.’ The quartet retired to a small cottage in the Berkshire countryside, where they could work out their sound — a unique blend of R&B, Beatlesque pop, psychedelia, jazz, and British folk — and jam long into the night without angering neighbors. Traffic debuted in the U.K. with the single ‘Paper Sun’ in May 1967, and soon issued their debut album Mr. Fantasy. Winwood broke up the band at the beginning of 1969. Even so, by that time, he had become the unofficial in-house keyboardist for Traffic’s label Island, playing at numerous recording sessions. Winwood subsequently hooked up with old friend Eric Clapton and their self-titled debut, Blind Faith, released in the summer of 1969, was a hit, but the extreme pressure on the group led to their breakup even before the end of the year. Winwood began work on what was slated to be his first solo LP, but he gradually brought in more ex-Traffic members to help him out, to the point where the album simply became a band reunion. John Barleycorn Must Die was released later in 1970, showcasing the sort of jam-happy jazz-rock sound that Winwood had in mind for the group from the start. Several more albums in that vein followed, including 1971’s The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, which brought Traffic to the peak of their commercial popularity in America. The run was briefly interrupted by Winwood’s bout with peritonitis around 1972, but he’d recovered enough to play a major role in Eric Clapton’s early-1973 comeback concerts at the Rainbow Theatre. Dismayed, he returned to Gloucestershire and all but disappeared from music. He returned in late 1980 with the little-heralded Arc of a Diver, a much stronger effort on which he played every instrument himself. Modernizing Winwood’s sound with more synthesizers and electronic percussion, Arc of a Diver was a platinum-selling hit in the U.S., helped by the hit single ‘While You See a Chance’; it received highly positive reviews as well.Winwood returned in 1986, with an album of slickly crafted, sophisticated pop called Back in the High Life, which was his first ’80s album to feature outside session musicians. It was a smash hit, selling over three-million copies and producing Winwood’s first number one single in ‘Higher Love,’ which also won a Grammy for Record of the Year. In 1987, Virgin offered Winwood a substantial sum of money and successfully pried him away from Island; a remixed version of Talking Back to the Night’s ‘Valerie,’ featured on the Island-greatest-hits compilation Chronicles, became a Top Ten hit later that year. Winwood’s hot streak continued with his first album for Virgin, 1988’s Roll With It. The title track became his second number one and his biggest hit ever, and the album topped the charts as well. The brilliant About Time appeared in 2003, followed in 2008 by Nine Lives
