Robben Ford is a man in motion. Scan the five-time Grammy nominee’s back catalogue – a half-century hot-streak that darts between jazz, rock, fusion and blues – and you’ll find a musician in a constant state of metamorphosis. Spin new album Two Shades Of Blue – a transatlantic modern classic that shapeshifted as the sessions unfolded – and you’ll feel the risks taken and rules broken. “I have that curse,” smiles the 74-year-old guitarist. “I don’t have two records that sound the same…”

With a new album around the corner, Robben feels at the top of his game right now. To be released 27 March 2026 on Artone/Provogue, Two Shades Of Blue is not the album Ford was planning to make – but it’s all the better for it. Tracked in the US and UK with two different crack-squad bands, this album paints with his inimitable palette, from the low-slung funk-blues of lead single Make My Own Weather to skyscraping instrumentals that even test the limits of a player ranked amongst the 100 Greatest Guitarists Of The 20th Century by Musician Magazine.

Likewise, Ford’s career has kept sparking precisely because he never made the safe moves. Born in 1951 to a musical Californian family, the saxophone held his focus until the epiphany, aged 13, of Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop tearing it up in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Soon, the young man was amongst the human sea at San Francisco’s Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom, soaking up shuddering sets by Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Led Zeppelin and B.B. King.

“I’m a big jazz fan,” says Ford, “especially the guys who are a little out there: Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp and of course, Miles Davis. But I never felt I was that good on the saxophone. The guitar, I excelled at far quicker. And once I started getting hired by other people, that brought me to a whole new level.”