Marc Ribot and Me… — Vinyl Magic

I have always, for years, been doing projects that are essentially rock bands in disguise. Rootless Cosmopolitans was a rock band disguised as a new music band. Los Cubanos Postizos was really a punk rock band disguised as a Cuban music band. A lot of things I've done, even the Albert Ayler project (Spiritual Unity), because it translates to guitar, is some kind of weird punk rock disguised as playing the music of Albert Ayler. Although it's true that the definitions break down somewhere near that border.
Saying 'disguised' is a little bit of an exaggeration. In other words, I like approaching things indirectly. For example, if I were a saxophone player, I would never have done the Albert Ayler project. Something interesting happens when you try to translate something. I never think in verbal language or musical language. Translation simply does not create the original meaning, it creates a new meaning whether you want it or not, but I want it to. I knew that bringing the Ayler material into guitar was going to change it and also change the guitar. I knew in advance so it wasn't entirely an unconscious thing. I wanted to draw some connections. I knew when I played that material on guitar it was going to mess with some people's assumptions about what jazz is as well. People who only listen to a certain type of punk rock would find themselves being moved by an Albert Ayler composition. It wasn't exactly like I had a dirty secret and was trying to hide it. I knew that was where I came from and there's nothing I could or would want to do about that.

Marc Ribot

Actually, I've gotten most of my inspiration from saxophone players like John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, but Albert Ayler in particular. He was definitely an enraged punk rocker of the saxophone, More than that, he brought it to a religious intensity. What he was doing was common to the best rock show I've ever been at, in that he was trying to create a ritual - an event right there for the people - a ritual that would bring them to create a deep emotional response, or a visceral response.

Marc Ribot

***Songs Of Resistance 1942-2018 (2018) signed by Marc***

It’s not that we’ve never written a set list. At least once every tour, I try to write one, but we have never in the history of this band - and probably in the history of all my bands - actually played the set list that I wrote. So there’s always a lot of messing around. It’s not only in terms of what tune we play next, there’s a lot of rearranging the tunes while we do them. A lot of improvising between tunes, during tunes, in spite of tunes. So yeah, it’s how we look at what we do.
Marc Ribot
Making a record is always a process of discovery. Things change and they change up till the last minute. Things that we toured with on the road that were the big rave-up numbers on the road, sometimes sound like shit when you record them, or even just when you get into the studio. So yeah, nothing ever turns out - or at least in my case - nothing ever turns out like you plan it. I know that for a lot of composers, like when I work with John Zorn, I feel like when he goes into the studio, he wants to realize his compositions, whereas for me, a lot of composition occurs within the studio. The composition, or the art, doesn't live in the abstract, or on a piece of paper, or even as a conception. It's very much dependent on what sounds good over those mics in that room.

Marc Ribot

The first ones, the Rain Dogs ones, were astounding.. It was one of those things, the people involved, the room was great and it was my first time working with Tom (Waits). Yeah, that whole period I remember as being super creative. He's very creative as a producer. That was recorded in a big old studio that doesn't exist anymore - the old RCA Studio A on 6th Avenue in New York, Mid Town. We just set up in the middle of this huge room and played like a garage band. It was really fun.
One of the most interesting directions was when I started to play in the style that I had used previously and he said, 'The minute that people know what something is, they stop listening.' In other words, play what the song needs. And Waits very much thinks like a theater director in terms of what the characters are, who the character that's speaking is - 'cause he's a lot of different characters, ya know - when they're speaking and where they're speaking. Are they whispering something in their lover's ear? Or are they in a rowdy bar, and where is the bar? Is it in Germany in the Weimar era? Or is it in Detroit? And each one of those different scenarios implies a different kind of guitar sound. Not only the sound, but there's a different kind of reverb implied. How close are you supposed to be? The way he works is he calls people who are capable of getting an understanding of his project, what he's trying to do on each different tune. Open mindedness is important and also a willingness to make the lyric be first. Not, man, I gotta do a bitchin' solo, you know what I mean? Because sometimes it calls for a moronic solo!
Marc Ribot on recording with Tom Waits

***Rain Dogs (1985) back cover signed by Marc***

A skilled and talented guitarist, Marc Ribot has had an amazing career as a leader on over twenty-five albums, while also supporting a wide variety of artists on hundreds of recordings and tours. Everyone from soul legends James Brown, Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett, to chanteuses Marianne Faithfull, Norah Jones and Diana Krall, to avant-garde composers Arto Lindsay, John Lurie and John Zorn, to jazz artists Jack McDuff and McCoy Tyner, to rockers The Black Keys, Elvis Costello and Robert Plant, to the incomparable sui generis of Tom Waits (yes, Waits deserves his own category!). It is hard to imagine a more versatile and varied guitar discography.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1954, Marc grew up the son of a prominent physician. The rigors and study of medicine was not the course that Marc would take as he was smitten by music. First, he played trumpet, “I actually started playing trumpet like kids do when they are in school. I wanted to play guitar starting when I was ten, and a big influence on me when I first started was a friend of my family, the Haitian born classical guitarist Franz Casseus. I wasn't interested in classical music per se, but starting from when I was six or seven, I heard him play at family gatherings and it just amazed me to hear a real musician playing the guitar like that." Soon, Marc took guitar lessons with Franz and a musical career was born.

Originally, Marc came to New York City in the late 1970s to play jazz, joining the Hammond B3 master Jack McDuff, a peerless guitar scout who had enlisted other jazz guitar legends George Benson, Grant Green and Pat Martino in his earlier bands. Marc lasted four months, as he found the experience surprisingly stultifying, "When I moved to New York in 1978, the first thing I thought about was cheap apartments, and I managed to find them for quite some time. This played a part in what enabled me to experiment with music and pursue my own style even when I was low on cash... At the time, I thought I was going to be a jazz musician. That didn't work out for a lot of reasons. I mean, I tried but the people on the jazz scene didn't like my playing so much, and I found out that most of them really just played weddings for a living. Before that, when I was in Maine, I had assumed jazz was the music of freedom and rock music was simply a popularity contest. I discovered the opposite in New York. The jazz musicians there were all versed in the same repertoire, and everybody was trying to be George Benson. I wasn't that well acquainted with the Loft and the avant-garde scene, so I started going to CBGB and started checking out the rock bands there, and there was a real creative energy there that drew me in... There was a lot of interesting things going on. What became known as the downtown scene was really a mixture of experimental trends in the rock world, the jazz world, and the so-called downtown classical world. So I started listening to these people and found my own way through it."

***The Prosthetic Cubans (1998) signed by Marc***

So Marc became a denizen of the downtown scene, and joined the Lounge Lizards, a band helmed by saxophonist John Lurie and his brother Evan, a pianist. He remembered, "I have had a lot of formative years. I think I'm still having them, hopefully. Yeah, an important time for me was when I started working with the Lounge Lizards and was listening to a lot of No Wave players and musicians in New York. I was listening to DNA, Arto Lindsay. I mean, I'd studied jazz stuff, but what Arto played seemed to me to be closer to the music I liked than what any jazz guitarist was doing. He was playing complete noise." No Wave was a short lived New York movement of musicians who combined classical, jazz and rock music in atonal and experimental excursions. It was a protest against New Wave which was seen as too commercial. Marc thrived on the discordance and dissonance. The Lounge Lizards' performances would include knotty original compositions as well as deconstructed Thelonious Monk covers which were more free jazz and Ornette Coleman, and bore little resemblance to bebop and Dizzy Gillespie.

***Muy Divertido (2000) signed by Marc***

Marc released his first album as a leader in 1990 and followed up with seven others before he had a surprising hit with The Prosthetic Cubans in 1998, an homage to the great blind Cuban composer and guitarist Arsenio Rodriguez. Marc explained, "I'd been listening to this Arsenio Rodriguez stuff for about six years, really loved it, and I put together a band with some old friends. I figured we'd book into some obscure bar, a once-a-week gig. But obscure bars are getting harder and harder to find apparently, because on our third gig, we got offered a deal by Atlantic Records." The music and melodies worked better than anyone would have thought: the songs were sensuous Cuban rhythms played through the filter and lens of a distorted, downtown thrash guitar. Marc released a follow up album, but his restless creativity and relentless exploration craved other opportunities. For the past decade, he has performed with Ceramic Dog, a guitar trio with punk rock shadings, and The Young Philadelphians, an homage to Philly Soul, replete with Teddy Pendergrass, MFSB and Van McCoy covers, all the while showcasing his extraordinary guitar skills. The Young Philadelphians are not your parent’s soul music, rather they are a translation via the Bowery and Knitting Factory, downtown habitues for the eternally hip.

***The Young Philadelphians (2015) signed by Marc***

I have seen Marc perform several times with Tom Waits and also with Marianne Faithfull over the years. I was lucky to see Marc on September 26, 2019 at the Iridium in New York City, six months before things got really weird. Marc was performing with the Jazz Bins, a trio featuring Greg Lewis on Hammond B3 and Chad Taylor on drums. They opened with some bluesy grease, Marc seated and hunched over, bending soulful notes which led to some frenetic and furious runs, while Greg Lewis was scorching the Hammond, channeling Charles Earland, The Mighty Burner, driving the bass and bottom with his foot pedals. They mixed in a gorgeous ballad with tasty brushes by drummer Chad Taylor, then moved uptempo driven by Taylor's crisp, crackling snare shots and some rococo flourishes, while Lewis added “On Broadway” riffs into the mix. Next, it was some straight up funk filth with "TSOP," the eternal MFSB soul groover. Marc said nary a word to the audience until the encore: "If there's anything to be nostalgic for, it might as well be this," before he launched into a gorgeous and sensitive “Stardust," the beautiful Hoagy Carmichael standard. It was a phenomenal performance which showcased the singular talents and eclectic song book of Marc Ribot and his cohorts.

***Marc Ribot The Iridium September 26, 2019***

After the show, I met Marc and I told him that it seemed like he was getting back to his roots, the organ trio of Jack McDuff, "Yes, that's exactly right, that's what I meant from the stage." To get some Hammond B3 cred, I told him that Jimmy McGriff played my wedding, That raised an eyebrow, “Wow, that tells me you have really good taste in music." 'Yes, that's why I'm here,' I replied. I mentioned that I was disappointed that he didn't mention the song titles. I heard snippets of "On Broadway," "Zippity Doo Dah," Thelonious Monk's "Well, You Needn't," and Hoagy Carmichel's "Stardust." What were some of the other songs? "Oh, sorry about that, they were all obscure, deep tracks, like The Mindbenders, Mike Clark and Joe Jones. Not Philly Joe or (Basie drummer Papa) Jo, just Joe Jones ( a New Orleans songwriter who falsely claimed writing "Iko Iko," but a talent nonetheless). You know, obscure people like that." As he signed Rain Dogs, I mentioned that I saw him perform with Waits twenty years earlier at the Beacon Theater in NYC, and Keith Richards was seated a couple of rows behind me. "Yes, I heard he was there and I saw him at the after party." An amazing show, I said, 'It's great that you have such a long term relationship with Waits, playing and recording with him for over thirty years, any chance you tour with him again?' "I hope so. If he calls, I'm ready to go anywhere," Marc said with a big smile. I thanked him for his time, and especially his brilliant music.

Marc Ribot, a singular talent on guitar, whether playing Cuban sons, Philly soul classics, jazz standards, or experimental thrash. Long may he shred!