Robben Ford
Robben Ford goes bold with Pure, the new instrumental outing he calls “the most complete expression of a musical life.”
“MY CHOPS WERE UP FOR THE INSTRUMENTAL THING, SO I THOUGHT I SHOULD GO WHERE THE ENERGY WAS”
THOUGH HE’S A talented singer and songwriter, Robben Ford has nevertheless become a legend primarily for his prodigious guitar prowess. In addition to the fabulous fretwork on his own records, he is known for turning in stunning, lyrical solos on recordings featuring Jimmy Witherspoon, Michael McDonald, Miles Davis, the Yellowjackets, the L.A. Express, and even Bruce Willis and Kiss.
“From a very early age, I was drawn to beautiful melodies,” he says. “Eric Clapton is a melody player, as is Hendrix. They were not playing bebop. It was about feeling, sound and texture. Those were things I was attracted to: the sound of this note against that chord, as opposed to a lot of notes.”
Given the enthusiasm for Ford’s guitar playing, it’s remarkable that almost a quarter of a century has passed since he released an all-instrumental record under his own name. There have been vocal-less side projects with former Miles Davis group saxophonist Bill Evans, and a series of trio projects with drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and bassist Jimmy Haslip under the Jing Chi moniker, but Ford’s last instrumental solo record was 1997’s Tiger Walk.
In the interim, the guitarist, known as a master of tone, taste and time, has been honing his skills as a singer and songwriter on two decade’s worth of releases. These have largely followed a tried-and-true process: Gather a fantastic rhythm section of bass, drums and keyboards, go into a world-class studio, and knock out the new
batch of tunes as live as possible. Occasional variations might include adding a trombonist (as on 2013’s Bringing It Back Home), bringing in former Black Crowe Audley Freed to play rhythm guitar so he could cut an entire record in 24 hours (2014’s A Day in Nashville) or even forsaking his sacred Dumble (2018’s Purple House). Still, fans could be pretty sure that, while each release might feature a new band and maybe some new gear, it would essentially be a snapshot of the latest batch of songs.
But with his new album, Pure (Ear Music), Ford breaks from the recipe in a couple of ways. For starters, the return to his instrumental roots. “Writing songs with lyrics is really hard,” he says. “My strongest voice is my guitar playing. In my early 20s, I had written a lot of instrumentals in a jazz vein for the Yellow Jackets, as well as for my first solo album. I had also made two records recently with Bill Evans. My chops were up for the instrumental thing, and I was enjoying it, so I thought I should go where the energy was and let the music tell the story.”
Telling a story with his music is one of the things that separates Ford’s playing from other guitarists and many other instrumentalists as well. This is evident on Pure in the compositions as well as the solos. “I wanted to feel something,” he says, “to be moved by a voice, to be talked to.” To that end, he speaks to the listener in a number of tongues. Fans from his days with Jimmy Witherspoon, the Charles Ford Band and Charlie Musselwhite will be thrilled by the blues mastery of “White Rock Beer…8 Cents,” and “Blues for Lonnie Johnson.” The title track translates the soul of the blues into a Middle Eastern dialect through the addition of exotic percussion and a virtuoso oud player. “Balafon” speaks in what today might be called a neo-soul vernacular, though Ford comes to the style more through O.G. practitioners like Curtis Mayfield, Cornell Dupree, et al. In another departure from his usual modus operandi, the guitarist largely eschewed live recording for a more layered, painterly approach. Like Purple House, the new album was recorded by Ford and engineer/ co-producer Casey Wasner at Wasner’s studio (also called Purple House) in Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee. They began rehearsals with a rhythm section, imagining they would record the record live, in typical Ford fashion. It soon became evident that the guitarist had a new vision, one that needed to be realized exactly as he imagined it. “When you bring guys into the studio, you have to let them sound the way they play, and it influences the music,” Ford says. “I felt that this time I wanted to have it my way.”
To that end, he and Wasner built the tracks from the ground up. “Other than bass and drums, it’s all Casey and me,” Ford explains. “I played all the guitars, keyboards and sometimes even synth bass. When I was orchestrating, I might want to hear something low. Normally, it would be the bass, but sometimes I didn’t want to hear bass guitar doing that low thing because it sounded too pedestrian, too predictable. I was able to make choices and go a different way. We’d get everything we liked using a click track, except for one song where Casey played drums. If we did use a bass player, we’d get it to where we could say, ‘Here’s what we’re looking for.’”
Once the rhythm ideas were set, Ford employed multiple drummers to realize them. “We sent tracks to Toss Panos in L.A. to play on one or two songs. I sent Keith Carlock one song, and Nate Smith is on the slow blues, along with Dave Rowe on bass. The shuffle has my brother Patrick Ford on drums.”
These days, it’s easy enough to layer parts in such a way as to give the illusion that the music was recorded in the same room by a group of musicians playing at the same time. This was not part of Ford’s plan, however. Instead, he and Wasner used the studio as a palette with which to mix in some sonic colors that might not normally be a part of a live performance documentation. The guitar sounds are often couched in their own ambience, either by applying a room sound different from the drum space, adding slap echo or reverb, or by incorporating of all the above. The tune “White Rock Beer…8 Cents” features climbing reverb tails that appear at the end of some of the phrases.
“On that tune, there are two bars open after the last phrase on the five chord,” Ford explains. “There’s a lot of space there, but I didn’t want to play any more
“I’M DOING THE BROAD STROKES. IT’S MORE IMPORTANT TO ME TO COMMUNICATE AS A MUSICIAN THAT’S PRESENT AND ALIVE”
melody, so we put a reverb tail on that last note and manipulated it, to make it go up. It cracks me up. I like humor in music. I felt it was in the tradition of Les Paul.”
Ford’s guitar playing remains sui generis. Many have tried to sound like him, but no one has succeeded. And while his sound might be inimitable, any professional artist ignores the current landscape at his or her peril. It is essential to consider where one’s offering sits in the pantheon of similar records being released, and Ford has his own way of approaching this. “Naturally, you think of all the people who’ve been making guitar instrumental records their whole lives,” he says. “I don’t listen to those guys, but I’m aware of them and how brilliantly they can play. There’s an element of having to compete. It’s just natural. But I come back to who I am as a guitar player, what I have to offer, and go with that.”
One thing he has to offer is his unique approach to the blues. He demonstrated his mastery of this American art form through recording the solos for “White Rock Beer…8 Cents” and “Blues for Lonnie Johnson” in unedited live takes. These performances were originally streamed, in real time, through his Instagram account. Though relatively new to social media, Ford simultaneously managed to challenge himself and build anticipation for the record. “My girlfriend talked me into it,” he reveals. “She said, ‘You become a different guy in front of an audience.’ It was terrifying on some level, but it brings up this live performance energy.”
Ford has always had a special relationship with the saxophone. As proof, one need only listen to how his guitar tone melds with Bill Evans’ horn for some of the heads on Pure. “Bill and I have made two records now playing melodies together,” he says. “We have a very natural way of playing with each other, with a lot of listening. Saxophone has probably been the instrument I have listened to most in my life. I used to play it, so I know exactly how he’s fingering whatever I give him. I write with that awareness.” The guitarist likes saxophone so much that he uses two as the complete horn section on the record, with Jeff Coffin from the Dave Matthews Band joining Evans. This differs from more typical horn sections that might include a trumpet.
“Sax and trumpet speak of a certain time, more Stax or Muscle Shoals,” Ford says. “That’s one of the reasons why I don’t use the trumpet. It’s too dominant of a voice. Two saxophones create the texture I’m looking for, more like an organ.”
On many current blues records, the horns are added after the solos are recorded, and thus there is little to no interaction between the guitarist and the section. Ford has had his own issues playing with horn arrangements in some big-band situations. “I’m playing, and then suddenly there’s this horn riff,” he explains. “I’m a call-and-response kind of guy, but I don’t know when those riffs are coming, which makes it really hard.” On Pure, however, the guitarist wrote the arrangements, so he knew exactly what was coming, which allowed a delightful guitar/horn section conversation during his solo on “Blues for Lonnie Johnson.”
The last time Guitar Player spoke to Ford, for the release of Purple House, he was having an issue recording his famous Dumble, a problem he solved for Pure. “This time the live tracks were cut in bigger rooms,” he explains. “The Dumble needs to be cranked. We cut the blues songs at Sound Emporium, which has a large room. I used an overdrive pedal but no delays or reverbs. It’s just a guitar plugged into an amp. Everything else was put on in post-production.”
Having used non-Dumble amps on the last record, Ford continues to experiment with different choices, particularly Little Walter amps. “[Little Walter owner] Phil Bradbury made me a 15-watt amplifier called the King Arthur and a 50-watter called the 59,” he says. “He’s also made a hundred-watt head, but I just got that recently. For the melody on ‘Pure,’ I used the 15-watt with a single 12-inch speaker cranked all the way up. The solo for that song was cut at Casey’s using the 50-watt head and an overdrive pedal.”
While he has been known to record entire albums with one guitar, à la Bringing It Back Home’s 1966 Epiphone Riviera, for Pure he luxuriated in being able
“I FIND THAT IF I DON’T TRY TO COMPETE AND AM JUST MY NATURAL SELF, I HAVE NEW THINGS TO SAY”
to pick the perfect instrument for the part. The Riviera makes an appearance for the melody of “Go,” while his 1960 Telecaster handles the rhythm. For the “Milam Palmo” melody he used a 1964 Gibson ES-355. “And then, for the solo, I moved to a ’52 Tele where nothing is original except the body and neck,” he recalls “I don’t even know what the pickups are.”
Though you might think it is a Tele playing on “Blues for Lonnie Johnson,” it is, in fact, a custommade, black Paul Reed Smith McCarty model with the pickups split and the amp cranked up. “Pure” divides the guitar duties between a red PRS for the solo and Ford’s ’64 SG for the melody. “For ‘White Rock Beer,’ I used a practically brand-new Les Paul with incredible sounding ’50s PAFs in it,” he says. “I wanted to play a Les Paul for the traditional Eric Clapton English thing.”
For another rocked-out solo, the guitarist again used the Epiphone. “I was sitting in a chair and used the Hermida Zendrive through the Dumble, once again cranked up loud in a big room,” he says. The occasional acoustic part is courtesy of Casey Wasner’s ’65 Gibson B-25. “He has one exactly like mine,” Ford reveals. “It was all about what texture we wanted”
In recent years, Ford has been using an ElectroHarmonix POG both live and on recordings. The POG is an octave-generating pedal, which the guitarist felt inspired him to play more jazz-inflected lines. But for Pure he has abandoned it. “It was just too POG,” he says with a laugh.
Asked whether he still practices, Ford offers an answer that may frustrate those who spend hours in their rooms attempting to achieve half his fluency and musicality. “I never practiced the guitar in a formal way, except for a brief period with the L.A. Express and Joni Mitchell,” he replies. “That’s when I got a book and started learning the fundamental scales: major, harmonic minor, melodic minor, et cetera. I started practicing them using back-and-forth picking technique for a period of about six months. That’s the only real practice I ever did. Otherwise, I have just played and listened. Everything I play is strictly by ear.”
As to where he feels his playing is headed, the artist known as Robben Ford references another great artist, the painter Henri Matisse. “At the end of his career, he started painting big things that were really simple, like the yellow man figure on a blue background with a red star, or a big green palm leaf on a blue background,” he says. “That’s where I’m at in my career as an artist. I’m doing the broad strokes. It’s more important to me to say something, to communicate as a musician that’s present and alive. There are so many guitarists who, as far as I am concerned, can play rings around me. I can’t compete with that. My chop [sic] is different. I love colors, sounds and melodies. I’m still growing as a musician. I find that if I don’t try to compete and am just my natural self, I have new things to say. I’m older. I don’t play as fast or aggressively as I once did. That comes with time. It’s like another painter, Renoir, who said, ‘When you get older, you realize you can always take the next train.’ What’s your hurry?”
Pure seems more than just another record for Ford. It is a departure, but also a summing up. “More than anything I’ve ever done, this record is the most complete expression of a musical life,” he says. “Unlike most of my records, it’s not a simple recording of a place in time. This is the whole story in one album, with not a lyric on the whole thing. That works for me.”