Higher education: Steve Winwood gettin' some lovin' from Berklee
At long last, Steve Winwood has been vindicated. A paltry 45 age afterwards getting booted from music shoal for claiming “Tramp Over Beethoven” was as awesome as, well, Ludwig van Beethoven, Winwood - world Health Organization turns 60 on Mon - is getting his level. Non from his former school in Pittsburgh of the South, England, only from Berklee College of Medicine.
Two years later on his sold-out Berklee Performance Centre gig Th, Winwood will welcome an honorary doctor's degree of music at Berklee’s beginning ceremony along with associate honorees Duke of Edinburgh Nathaniel Bailey and Maurice Ovalbumin of Ground, Hint & Fire; “The Divine of the Rings” composer Howard Land; and Brazilian artist Rosa Passos.
No holy Scripture on whether Winwood and EWF (or Leslie Howard Shore) testament be crashing Wally’s for an after hours jam. But Winwood, at least, will be back opening for and electronic jamming with Tomcat Petit larceny and the Heartbreakers (on June 13 at TD Banknorth Garden and June 14 at the Tweeter Center, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp).
“As mortal wHO left home and school at age 15, I’ll take anything I tin can pay back,” Winwood said of the Berklee honors from his home studio apartment in Gloucestershire. “I did go to music college for a little patch. Music education in European Union at that fourth dimension, in the latterly ’50s, early on ’60s, was quite different than it is in the United States today. Anything other than serious euphony was considered quite frivolous.
“Handel and Bach was the musical comedy inheritance of Europe,” he continued. “Merely at the time I was departure to school, the American musical inheritance was becoming Chuck Charles Edward Berry. Ace day I was brought to principal’s berth and asked what I liked. I said Stravinsky, merely as well said Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Ray Charles. I was told to leave around that or leave.”
For Winwood, it was an slowly option. At 14, he was already gigging in local blues and jazz clubs. Merely a year later, he would connect his bass-playing older brother, Muff Winwood, in the Spencer John Davys Group and go on to co-write monster hits “Gimme Just about Lovin’ ” and “I’m a Man.”
“I had roughly pocket money so I view, ‘Thanks really a good deal, merely I’m going away,’ ” he said. “Now it’s possible, you toilet do a degree on Fats.”
Intimately, at least at Berklee it is.
If you push aside the unit flunking come out of music school thing, Winwood’s an nonpareil candidate for a Berklee doctor's degree. After graduating from the r & b of the Herbert Spencer Davis Grouping, he founded Traffic, an experimental isthmus that covered nigh everything in Berklee’s syllabus from stone, blues and pop to malarky, folk music and world.
Now, afterwards a decade-plus recreation that pulled him toward adult contemporary, Winwood has spent clock time returning to his roots. His freshly record album, “Baseball club Lives,” is a summation of his musical theater incarnations that mixes his ’70s experiments with his ’80s pop and, with an impressive guitar cameo by Eric Clapton, also nods to his short-lived ’60s supergroup Blind Faith.
Think of “Ball club Lives” as a thesis on “The History and Development of the music of Steve Winwood.” Winwood’s old school edgar Lee Masters probably wouldn’t think of it that agency. Just, hey, if they still can’t become into “I’m a World,” does anyone caution what they think?
