Label: earMUSIC
Release date: 8/27/2021
Production: Robben Ford & Casey Wasner
Album length: 39.37 min
Genre: Jazz / Blues / Jazz-Rock Fusion
Rating: 9.0/10
Robben Ford is a musician who needs no introduction. Globally speaking, he’s in the league of a handful of the most important guitarists who, through who they are and what they do, have left (or are still leaving) a real mark. And not just through what they record and release, but because they’ve had a tangible influence on the development of guitar technique itself. Well, Robben Ford has put out a new studio album this year too. It comes 24 years after “Tiger Walk” (1997), his first all-instrumental record. It runs under 40 minutes, but the musical substance is crammed to the brim with all kinds of information, and in tune with what we expected from the new album, it keeps Ford on a very special pedestal among the world’s contemporary jazz guitarists.
The biggest magnet when listening to Robben Ford play is the sensual refinement of his guitar language. The hunt for countless shades of color, and the way he plays them up. Shades between the shades. Filigree, perfectionist ‘hair-splitting’ in the way he strings together perfectly tuned notes, which reach an incredible payoff of color and sensitive variety. Two notes in a row are never played with the same intensity and sensitivity. It keeps flowing and shifting in the character of the expression. A pile of subtleties and details that blend into and complete each other like a harmonious conversation in Robben’s playing remain, on “Pure” too, a blank sheet of paper that keeps building the one-of-a-kind dossier of this fascinating musician. So on the new album Ford once again masterfully cruises between jazz, rock and blues, while also delivering a few musical adventures he’s never tried in his long career. This time he also drew inspiration from Native American music.
Nine tracks, counting the title prelude and the (no less) title instrumental near the end of the album, which is what the whole story revolves around. For the first time in his career, Ford went about it by playing most of the songs on guitar first. He prepared the frameworks. Fixed frameworks. Then he called in the musicians to contribute their own parts. This time Ford wanted more control over the rhythm, he wanted precision. So neither the bassists nor the drummers got any freewheeling ‘meandering’. Only three songs on the new album were recorded the classic way, meaning as a band in the studio: Blues For Lonnie Johnson, Go and If You Want Me To. In those, the dialogue of the horns really stands out. Robben Ford backed the sonic picture of these arrangements with horns, and gave saxophonists Bill Evans and Jeff Coffin some room to shine with their solo wizardry. The horns are wisely ‘attached’ to the guitar phrasing, or complement it in contrast (call and response). When the guitar accompaniment sounds fat and chocolatey in its phrasing, the horn (saxophone) parts can also be placed in harmonies, which makes the soundscape even fuller and better used.
As is well known, Ford has an exceptional guitar collection at home. This time he brought into the studio a few that he’d rarely used for recording before. One of them is, for example, a 1964 Gibson ES 355 on the track Balafon. Once again the man layered multiple guitar lines, parts and sections in the songs, and the contrasts of sonic depth he gets this way are, once again, immensely seductive. Especially when the talk turns to playing with reverb. These small, concise but strictly thought-out and measured ‘juicy, tasty tricks’ of sparkling minimalism, adding guitar ornaments into the motif structures, are very welcome from the old fox on tracks like the bluesy sorcery of White Rock Beer … 8 Cents and the previously mentioned Blues For Lonnie Johnson. It’s surprising how much extra movement you can get out of the language of guitar playing in songs that are basically formatted as a pretty predictable twelve-bar form. That goes especially for the blues waltz Blues For Lonnie Johnson, where Ford’s note ‘bending’ (the man uses a hybrid technique of fingers and pick) hits particularly intense and passionate.
“Pure” is an immensely varied piece of work. On it we also find a few especially exploratory, at times even esoteric tracks, where the guitarist’s unpretentiousness and his refined, inner feel for creating intense shifts of mood between motifs really shine. Balafon definitely belongs here, along with the most musical track on the album, the easygoing jazz instrumental Milam Palmo, with a faint whiff of calypso, while the peak of Ford’s expressive feats this time is concentrated in the performance of the title track. It was inspired by listening to Native American music. There’s tabla in it, which gives the song a ‘tribal’ flavor, and Ford plays his own jazz game without trying to imitate the traditional music of America’s indigenous peoples, laying down all the improvisations on the first take (‘in one take’), with no extra overdubs, ‘patch-ups’ or embellishments. The result is, once again, very special and eclectic. Go has an especially tantalizing jazz-funk moment, while in the particularly mysterious A Dragon’s Tail it’s a stately use of reverb that rules. The closing If You Want Me To feels as if Ford had written it together with someone like Clapton in the mid-eighties, since it reaches for the airwaves. Except the vocals are replaced by the expressiveness of the guitar playing.
With this new album Robben Ford isn’t bringing a musical revolution. But he stays as superb as ever. As he’s always been. He remains unique, and as such is still very much in demand among the spoiled connoisseurs and gourmets of contemporary jazz fine-tuning. “Pure” is yet another manifesto of perfectionism, born of mindful purism and honest reflections of a musician whose inner world is forever inspired, highly flexible and sensitive to stimuli, and who never stops delighting us in his expressions of transformed creative abundance.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Pure (Prelude)
2. White Rock Beer…8 Cents
3. Balafon
4. Milam Palmo
5. Go
6. Blues For Lonnie Johnson
7. A Dragon’s Tail
8. Pure
9. If You Want Me To
Lineup:
Robben Ford – guitar, all keyboards except on track 3
Bill Evans – saxophone on tracks 2, 5 and 6
Jeff Coffin – saxophone on tracks 2, 5 and 6
Russell Ferrante – Wurlizer on track 3
Jimmy Malis – oud on track 9
Steve Mackey – bass guitar on track 4
Anton Nesbitt – bass guitar on tracks 5 and 9
Brian Allen – bass guitar on tracks 3 and 7, acoustic bass solo on track 9
Dave Row – bass guitar on tracks 2 and 6
Patrick Ford – drums on track 2
Keith Carlock – drums on track 3
Casey Wasner – drums on track 4
Nate Smith – drums on tracks 5 and 6
Toss Panos – drums on tracks 7 and 8
Shannon Forest – drums on track 9, drums under the guitar solo on track 7
Wes Little – percussion on track 4
Satam Rangotra – tabla on track 9
