ONE WORLD

This is an odd little album that finds John Martyn teaming up with Steve Winwood, whose organ playing adds jazzy, funky accents to Martyn's already typically laid-back sound. The end result is a weirdly sunny-sounding album which sort of resembles a folk rock artist's attempt to figure out what reggae sounded like based only on some rather vague descriptions. A strange mix, yes, but somehow an intoxicatingly catchy one, making this stylistic experiment a reasonable success, if weighed down by a somewhat plastic-ish production. Despite the fact that it its further outside the usual folk rock sphere than either Bless the Weather or Solid Air, somehow this manages to be the most accessible of Martyn's 1970s works.