When punk rock broke through in 1977, it served as a "put up or shut up" challenge to rock’s old guard. The established bands who took notice — the Rolling Stones with Some Girls, Neil Young with Rust Never Sleeps, the Kinks with Low Budget — took the back-to-basics route to what turned out to be career peaks. Others, like the Who, ran hard in the other direction and paid the price for slickening up their sound. But for Young, the Kinks, and the Stones, it wasn’t about jumping aboard the latest trend — they simply fell back on a more urgent version of what they’d been doing all along.

Lately, the jam-band movement has had the same kind of ripple effect on veteran artists that punk had back in the ’70s. Phish and Widespread Panic have proven that a band can be successful by doing exactly what bands did in the late ’60s — stretching out on stage, writing noncommercial songs, and playing them live in the studio. The old-guard beneficiaries thus far have been the Allman Brothers Band, whose new Hittin’ the Note (Peach/Sanctuary) is a jam-heavy return to form (Sean Richardson’s review is on page 20), and Neil Young, who’s about to release a sprawling Crazy Horse concept album titled Greendale (Reprise). But nobody’s been more revitalized by the jam scene than Steve Winwood, whose aptly titled About Time (on his own Wincraft label) harks back to his Traffic glory days more than three decades ago.

Like many of his contemporaries (Eric Clapton, Genesis, the ’80s/’90s Stones, and the "Touch of Grey" Grateful Dead), Winwood survived in the MTV era by lowering his mainstream expectations. Starting with 1981’s Arc of a Diver (Island), he found a niche in heavily produced pop soul in more ways than one — indeed, in 1988 he made some waves by selling the song "Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do" to a beer company before it was even released. Thanks to his choirboy voice and his way with a tune, even his least successful releases have gone down easily. Yet compared with the inspired songcraft and exploratory playing on Traffic’s two peak albums, 1970’s John Barleycorn Must Die and ’71’s The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, his ’80s and ’90s output was sorely lacking. (The entire Winwood catalogue, including his work with Traffic, has just been reissued by Universal.)

Even though none of his old bandmates turns up on About Time, the disc amounts to a new Traffic album: it even sounds more like Traffic than the band’s nominal reunion disc, 1994’s Far from Home, on which Winwood played virtually everything. This time he restricts himself to the Hammond B-3 organ and lets each track run for as long as it needs to. The result is 11 songs in 70 minutes. Many of the songs, particularly the Brazilian-tinged "Cigano," are catchy enough to have fit on one of his ’80s albums. But the sound of live musicians riding a groove is something you were hardly ever allowed to hear on mainstream-rock discs at the time.

About Time’s world-beat flavorings also give the disc a contemporary feel, but that’s been part of the Winwood repertoire ever since his original days with Traffic, when he brought Nigerian percussionist Reebop Kwaku Baah into the mix. Even the disc’s token soul cover — "Why Can’t We Live Together," a one-chord wonder by Timmy Thomas — sounds current, thanks to an anti-war lyric that carries some weight in these times. And it’s telling that the finale, "Silvia (Who Is She?)," clocks in at 11:25 — just a half-minute shorter than "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys." It even sports a similar build-and-release arrangement.

Winwood’s June 21 appearance at the Tweeter Center, where he opened for the Dead, was partly notable for what he didn’t play — no "Higher Love," no "Back in the High Life," none of his ’80s hits. Instead, he kept to the format of About Time, stretching out enough to fill a 70-minute set with only eight songs — three from the new disc and five from Traffic (he also joined the Dead for the blues number "Loose Lucy"). He’s still got the pop instincts to know when to stop jamming, so "Empty Pages," a sublime, four-minute tune from Barleycorn, was kept to its original length. But when a song had corners worth exploring, he jumped right in: "Feelin’ Good" (an Anthony Newley number that Traffic covered) became a sprawling blues, with Winwood’s world-weary delivery undercutting the optimism of the lyrics.

At the end, he moved from keyboards to guitar for "Dear Mr. Fantasy," the early Traffic standard that’s well known to the jam audience (both Los Lobos and the Dead have covered it). It got the first ovation of the evening — probably a bigger one than he would’ve received for playing a more recent hit. Winwood re-created his original high vocal (no small feat after 35 years) while throwing new licks into his guitar solo. It didn’t feel like an oldies retread, just a confident display from an artist who’s back, maybe not in the high life, but definitely on the right track.