Steve Winwood Revolutions

Deluxe four CD set in hardbound book packaging. Revolutions: The Very Best Of Steve Winwood is a portrait of one of the most influential British musicians in Rock history, a singer/songwriter, peerless vocalist, guitarist and keyboard player. With a tracklisting personally selected by Steve Winwood from his five decade career, this collection features solo tracks as well as recordings with the bands he's worked with throughout the years including Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. 68 tracks.

With a glorious voice that sounds as if he has just swallowed a jar of cod liver oil, Winwood has the advantage of instant recognition; add to this a musicianship that has been employed in dozens of sessions over the past four decades, and the result is a prodigious talent that runs like a vein of gold through rock music since the Spencer Davis Group. Arc Of A Diver, released at the end of 1980 after a long period of self-imposed retreat, is a triumphant resurgence. With lyrical contributions by Viv Stanshall (the rich imagery of the title track) and Will Jennings, Winwood never falls into the trap of shaming the music with sub-standard words. Another musical genius.

Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records – The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be – a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s.

Dire Straits emerged during the post-punk era of the late '70s, and while their sound was minimalistic and stripped down, they owed little to punk. If anything, the band was a direct outgrowth of the roots revivalism of pub rock, but where pub rock celebrated good times, Dire Straits were melancholy. Led by guitarist/vocalist Mark Knopfler, the group built their sound upon the laid-back blues-rock of J.J. Cale, but they also had jazz and country inflections, occasionally dipping into the epic song structures of progressive rock. The band's music was offset by Knopfler's lyrics, which approximated the winding, stream-of-conscious narratives of Bob Dylan. As their career progressed, Dire Straits became more refined and their new maturity happened to coincide with the rise of MTV and the compact disc. These two musical revolutions from the mid-'80s helped make Dire Straits' sixth album, Brothers in Arms, an international blockbuster. The band – along with Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, and Steve Winwood – become one of the leaders of a group of self-consciously mature veteran rock & rollers in the late '80s that designed their music to appeal to aging baby boomers. Despite the band's international success, they couldn't sustain their stardom, waiting a full six years to deliver a follow-up to Brothers in Arms, by which time their audience had shrunk significantly.