Pop : Winwood’s Reborn Soul at Pacific

Steve Winwood’s career may have rebounded in 1986 with the hit-spawning “Back in the High Life” album, but the real comeback appears to be taking place on stage on his current tour, judging from his heated, highly musical performance at the Pacific Amphitheatre on Friday.

The tours that followed “High Life” showed his recent music in its worst light, with his performances coming off as formulaic and dispassionate.

But the Pacific show opened with a shouting, raging version of his 1967 Spencer Davis Group hit “I’m a Man,” with Winwood singing with a reborn feeling and soul and wrenching thick, snarling swells of sound from his Hammond B3 organ.

The rest of the two-hour show wasn’t as consistently intense as that incandescent opening, but it nearly always proved vital and alive. It’s fitting that Winwood’s hair is nearly back to its hippie length, because a sense of that era’s freedom and exploration ran through the show’s 17 songs, whether the raw British R&B; of his Spencer Davis days, Traffic’s spacious jazz-rock excursions or the synth-driven dance grooves of his more recent albums.

The 43-year-old singer/multi-instrumentalist’s disarmingly soulful voice and unerring musical sensibilities piloted his responsive five-piece band through some roiling waters, including an ebullient version of “Higher Love” and the rave-up encore-closer “Gimme Some Lovin’,” with his voice and that all-time killer organ riff roaring with all the urgency that he first poured into it when he was a 16-year-old wunderkind.