Winwood show features rough edges and all Traffic had come to a crossroads. Steve Winwood reunited with Jim Capaldi to make Far From Home in 1994, the first new music to bear the Traffic banner since 1974's When the Eagle Flies. The album and subsequent tour gave Winwood pause regarding his own albums. "I think my solo stuff was sounding a bit like Traffic, and I think Traffic was sounding a bit like the solo stuff,'' he told The San Francisco Chronicle. On his new solo album, Junction Seven, Winwood says he's "really attempting to take the two further apart." Mission accomplished. The slick, contemporary R&B grooves of the new disc, released in April, will never be confused with Traffic's stew of rock, jazz and folk. Winwood brought in Narada Michael Walden as co-producer; Walden counts Whitney Houston among his former clients. Walden co-wrote eight of the nine new songs on the album. Those tunes are added to a cover of Sly and the Family Stone's "Family Affair," on which Winwood is joined by Nile Rodgers. Winwood's love of black Americans' music stretches back to his boyhood in Birmingham, England. His older brother Mervyn would tape radio broadcasts and the two would thrill to the sound of Fats Domino, Charles Mingus and Little Richard. Mervyn began playing in a traditional jazz band, which one day needed a piano player. "I brought Steve along," the elder Winwood told Mojo magazine. "He was only 11 but he played everything perfectly." By the age of 12, Steve had written his first song and began a lifelong infatuation with Ray Charles. He'd also branched out to guitar as well as keyboards. In 1963, the brothers hooked up with Spencer Davis. The Spencer Davis Group conquered the States the next year with "Gimme Some Lovin' "' and "I'm a Man." But the precocious Steve was ready for something more experimental and at 19 bolted from the group to form Traffic. Then two years later, Winwood was off again, this time to the short-lived supergroup Blind Faith with Eric Clapton. After that group's disastrous US tour, Winwood reformed Traffic, moving in directions both jazzier (1970's John Barleycorn Must Die) and funkier (1971's The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys). Traffic disbanded for two decades after a 1974 tour. Winwood took his time establishing himself as a hit solo act. His eponymous 1977 album barely drew notice. But 1980's Arc of a Diver and its single, "While You See a Chance," were massive hits. Whatever grit gets sanded off on Winwood's CDs reportedly is reapplied in concert. A Los Angeles Times review, while criticizing Junction Seven as too slick, praised Winwood's show there, crediting him with "spurring (his band) to moments of white-hot funk," and noting that by show's end, "all the gloss had beenthoroughly burned away." -- Curtis Ross, pop music critic.of The Tampa Tribune on 9/19/97