ROBBEN FORD - Two Shades of Blue

They say that when the blues arrives in California, it puts on its best suit and flirts with jazz and swing under the West Coast sun. California blues isn't really a genre or a rigid tradition, but more a way of playing, one whose early standard-bearers were figures like T-Bone Walker and Charles Brown, and later Tommy Castro, Kirk Fletcher and indeed Robben Ford. From his beginnings with his brothers in the Charles Ford Band (named in honor of their father), through to encounters with Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, Robben Ford's life has been spent immersed in great music, refining a formidable guitar technique and a broad, wide-ranging musical culture.

Now 75, Ford has returned with a new record, "Two Shades Of Blue", on which half a century of music and influences naturally resurface. The project began as a tribute to Jeff Beck, but gradually evolved, through sessions in the US and UK, different bands of musicians, and ideas that kept accumulating along the way.

The title speaks of "two shades of blue", but on listening it's not immediately obvious what those two shades actually are — perhaps because we're really talking about gradations rather than opposites.

So the album opens with the energetic, funky "Make My Own Weather", where Rob Malarkey's deep bass, the solid rhythm and Jonny Henderson's keyboards create a groove that carries the song's yearning to escape toward the "northern lights" and "southern Mexico". It then veers elsewhere, with a successful cover of John Lennon's "Jealous Guy" and the following track, "Perfect Illusion", a sun-drenched rock ballad that manages to hold together energy, melancholy, determination and hope; it might sound like something you've heard before, yet in its crystalline precision it still manages to move and win you over.

Darkness resurfaces on "Black Night" (a Charles Brown cover), where Ford shows off his full range as a blues guitarist, updating and enriching the 1951 track and revitalizing it further with a Big Band intro and an arrangement in which horns reappear, trading lines with the vocals and the guitar's blues phrasing. From here on, the album turns instrumental, with the title track "Two Shades Of Blue" and then the following "The Fire Flute", "The Light Fandango" and "Feeling's Mutual", where Ford reveals all his jazz sensibility, and which are also the core of the album's original concept, starting from a meditation on Jeff Beck's innovative guitar techniques.

It won't be the album of the year, it won't be Robben Ford's masterpiece, but if you're after solid, well-crafted blues rock, this is the record for you.

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12/05/2026