Funk for thought

Robben Ford's meditative music

by Mark Edmonds

San Francisco guitarist Robben Ford doesn't seem to be afraid to take on anything. His instantly recognizable phrasing and signature tone have appeared on everything over the years from fusionistic projects with the Yellowjackets to George Harrison's and Joni Mitchell's records -- he even worked with those painted devils in Kiss. There were stints with Miles Davis, sessions with the Marsalis brothers, and countless brushes with other rockers, popsters, and jazz players. Simply put, Ford's been around.

Through these diverse gigs runs a common thread: a soulful, funky playing style borne out of some important lessons Ford (who appears at Northampton's Iron Horse on October 13) learned as a teenager on Bay Area bandstands with his brother's Charles Ford Blues Band. Oftentimes at these gigs, legends like Charlie Musselwhite and Jimmy Witherspoon sat in with the band, teaching Ford that to reach your audience you couldn't just focus on technique, you had to play from the heart, too.

Twenty years after school let out, Ford continues to live by that lesson. "I've gathered a lot of understanding over the years how music works," he explains. "But I'm still not all that evolved, really. I use certain devices that are present in the compositional skills that are taught in schools. But for me, it's a balance of that and really letting it flow. I look at music playing right now like that Chinese philosophy where there are three images of heaven, earth, and man. Heaven is music-school intellectualism. Earth is that certain funky thing in blues and R&B that speaks to people. And man joins the two somewhere. I'm sort of still at that earthy level." Let's hope he stays there.

Since 1988, Ford has released a series of solo projects with his Blue Line trio that form one of the freshest and most inventive bodies of contemporary roots-music work. The first in the series, 1998's Talk to Your Daughter (Warner Bros.), revealed a young guitar fiend re-casting blues standards while distilling the vapors from that genre -- and soul and R&B -- into a volatile, high-octane byproduct that surged with the raw energy of modern rock and roll. Perfecting this formula through successive discs, he had the impurities burned off by 1995's Handful of Blues (Blue Thumb) to the point that his own compositions sounded like a cross between Albert King and John McLaughlin. Biting fusillades of bent-string notes often punctuated his otherworldly, banshee-wail singing. In a world full of wearying genericism, his sound stood out like a Day-Glo bullseye.

Just when we thought we had Ford figured out, here comes Tiger Walk (Blue Thumb), his latest project, where Ford eschews singing and familiarity for meditative instrumentals. The 10 songs wed his bluesy intuition to the freeform spirit of jazz, and the result is interesting. With a touch of funk's heavy-bottom backbeats thrown in, tracks such as the disc-opening "In the Beginning" recall the dark and greasy feel his onetime boss, Davis, captured during his heroin/electric period. "Red Lady w/ Cello" fuses hip-hop to dive-bomber bass runs in a P-Funk-meets-Weather-Report-somewhere-in-the-late-'90s kind of way. R&B rears its head on the throbbing "The Champ," while Hendrix-style wah-wahs scream through "Just like It Is." The disc contains so many textures that you hardly miss vocals at all.

Ford explains that Walk came out of a need to do something different. "I felt I'd gotten to a point with my lyric writing that I felt good about, but I was also kind of burned out a little bit, too. I'd been working with the Blue Line concept for literally nine years. I felt it was time to move on."

Rolling Stone Keith Richard's solo disc, Talk Is Cheap, provided initial inspiration for the project. "I thought it was some of the best rhythm-section work I'd heard in a long time," he says. "After that, I wanted to get those guys Keith had worked with. Sure they were playing rock, but deep down, they were hardcore R&B guys. There was a real funkiness to them that I had to have on my project."

Ford looks forward to playing his new compositions on the road. But there's one problem.

"I wanted to bring these guys with me," he says, referring to drummer Steve Jordon, bassist Charlie Drayton, and keyboardist Bernie Worrell who form the backbone of Walk's session band. "But it would have been far too expensive."

He says, though, that his road band, who include Alanis Morissette bassist Chris Cheney and Tribal Tech keyboardist Scott Kinsey, will have no problem recreating Walk's grooves.

"It's going to be a heavily instrumental set," Ford predicts of his Iron Horse show. "But we're also going to be mixing in a few from the first Blue Line album, and two or three from the others up to Handful of Blues. It's going to be fun."

Robben Ford plays the Iron Horse, in Northampton, on October 13 at 7 and 10 p.m. Tickets are $15. Call (413) 584-0610.