Plain and Fancy: 10/13/24

Sunday, October 13, 2024

Traffic - The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys (1971 uk, flavorful jazz prog rock, 2002 bonus track remaster)

If there’s one song that best illustrates the talent and imagination of Steve Winwood, it’s the 11-minute title track of Traffic’s fifth album, a hypnotic jazz-rock masterpiece and a searing indictment of the music industry.

The song rose up from a lyric Jim Capaldi roused himself to write about the withering effects of the music business on the artist. To this Winwood introduced a musical backdrop that moved like shifting sand: neither solely rock, blues or jazz, but each and more besides, changing almost from one bar to the next.

Altogether, and elsewhere on this, Traffic’s most restless record, shades and styles got jumbled up in the same pot, shaken into new shapes, then broken down and started up again. “It kind of sums up Traffic in a way,” Capaldi said at the time. “The eclectic-ness – you can’t put your finger on it at all, yet you know it’s familiar.”

"Stevie Winwood and I both grew up in the midlands," Glenn Hughes told us, choosing Low Spark... as one of the records that changed his life. "I was mad about his earlier band the Spencer Davis Group, but Traffic really hooked me in. I adored his Hammond organ playing and the subtlety and drama of his voice. Not many people would know that Stevie was a huge influence upon me whilst I was in my mid-teens, and he continued to be so all though my twenties and early thirties."

Classic-Rock, 16 August 2021