"Isn't she lovely," rhapsodises Stevie Wonder in one of his best known love ballads. Well, aren't they lovely?! The songs conveying the ripple of streams, the rush of rivers and the velocity of waterfalls. Stevie Wonder is to the American — Western — love ballad what James Stewart was to Hollywood acting. A born natural.

Through his highly original and versatile art Wonder has displayed the wondrous rapture of love. It could be the love of a man for a woman, or a human being's love for life. Then on the other hand Wonder's songs also draw attention to Man's inextricable relationship with Nature.

The right-side-up in Wonder's songs pleases the listener any which way. Like rolling clouds in a clear blue sky. Variable shapes are interpreted by the bystander. Those indeterminate shapes are essentially all a nostalgic evocation of elemental emotions.

In this stylishly resonant collection of Stevie Wonder's greatest hits, we listen with rapt attention as Stevie wraps us around his little `flinger' entitled `Kiss Lonely Good-bye'. The song is part of Walt Disney's recent animation film The Adventures Of Pinocchio. As we listen to the flawless and seamless merger of intuitive art and professional technique in the performance we are provoked to wonder, has this Wonderful Wonder-man really been singing for the last thirty five years?!

Blind since birth, Stevie Wonder (whose real name is Steveland Judkins) was born on May 13, 1950, in Michigan. A choir singer little Stevie was taken to meet Berry Gordy the president of the famous `black' label Motown. Gordy immediately signed Stevie. The first single released in August 1962 credited to `Little Stevie Wonder' was entitled I Call It Pretty Music But The Old People Call It The Blues. It featured the legendary Marvin Gaye on drums. The single failed to hit the charts.

But thereafter success was his, almost overnight. Stevie Wonder's first album Recorded Live — The 12 Year Old Genius topped the Hot 100, R & B singles and album charts in the US. By 1965 Stevie Wonder became resentful of Motown's stanglehold over his career. Efforts to renegotiate his career were constantly stonewalled. Years later Stevie performed a skit about his career-crisis on the popular American show Saturday Night Live. In the skit Wonder approached a record company executive with a request for artistic freedom. The executive replied, "Don't get arty on me. Boy geniuses are a dime a dozen."

Stevie Wonder had to push really hard to exercise creative freedom. In 1966, he succeeded in having his say through Uptight the song that came to be identified as Stevie's mainstay. Several successful albums followed. But it wasn't until Talking Book in 1972 that Wonder finally managed to become independent of what Motown needed and demanded from him.

Right from the way the title was written in braille on the cover of the album to the shape, placing and suggestions of individual tracks, Talking Book was Stevie Wonder's most personal album. The single Superstition became his first No. 1 hit in ten years. With Talking Book, Stevie Wonder crossed over from a predominantly black audience to a mainstream listening public. Or perhaps the word for Stevie Wonder's listeners should be `innerviewership'. The incandescent images in his songs paint perfect pictures of landscapes laden with sentimentality, salvation and poetry.

Innervisions in 1973 coincided with Stevie Wonder's serious road accident in which he suffered multiple head injuries and lay in a coma for four days. His popularity seemed to multiply with every album that hit the market. Both Innervisions (1973) and Fulfilingness (1975) won him four Grammys each. In 1975 Wonder was awarded in tribute to "a man who embodies every facet of the complete musical artiste: composer, writer, performer, recording artiste, musician and interpreter through his music of the culture of his time."

With other artistes it is fashionable to say that the best is always ahead of them. In Stevie Wonder's case this is the reality. Songs In The Key Of Life in 1976 and Hotter Than July in 1980 are regarded by many Wonder-struck fans as his two best albums to date. The latter album dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr was accompanied by a campaign by the musician to have King's birthdate as a national holiday. The American government complied in 1983. Wonder's success story got bigger and brighter with each passing year. In 1984 Wonder crooned what came to be his most beloved love ballad. I just called to say I love you contained in the film The Woman In Red it topped the UK chart for six weeks. It was Wonder's first solo no. 1 hit in Britain and one of the ten largest-selling singles in the UK of all times.

More record breaking success came Wonder's way with the zingy twist-and-slouch dancers' special Part Time Lover. It became the first US single to top the US pop, R&B, adult contemporary and dance-disco charts.

The distinctive aspect of the Wonder phenomenon is that each generation has its own numbers to identify the singer-songwriter with. The twentyone tracks contained in this mind-blowing anthology are all bolstered by the rituals of memory-recalls. There isn't a number here which isn't associated with some special event in the listener's life or an important happening in the global context.

With startling smoothness Wonder glides from the flouncy can't-take-my-eyes-off-you ballads to numbers that signify a deeprooted commitment to bettering the world we live in. These numbers include the famous duet Ebony & Ivory with Paul McCartney, Living for the city from the historic album Innervisions and a cooler-than-a-cola rendition of Bob Marley's Redemption song.

Stevie Wonder has no match. In every decade since the sixties he has created tracks that have stood the test of time. The sixties had Uptight. The seventies spawned the enigmatic Superstition. The eighties shall be measured by Wonder's I just called to say I love you. The nineties are prossessed by Wonder's Kiss lonely goodbye. As the next century approaches Stevie Wonder prepares to expand his innervision to include future generation.