Marc Ribot was already sitting for the alternative. In 2007, when the New York authorities cleared out the music club Tonic, which had ended up in debt, the American guitarist and longtime companion of the singer Tom Waits resisted. Convinced that “some music has the right to exist, even if it doesn’t make money”, he demonstratively refused to leave the stage. The police took him away in handcuffs. He spent four hours in custody.
It was a symbolic gesture from the 68-year-old New Yorker who, after Tuesday’s concert in Trutnov, will play this Wednesday in Prague’s Akropolis Palace. He explained it in a then-widely shared essay about the difficulties of operating alternative music in tourist-oriented New York.
Ribot timelessly argued that the best string quartet is not always the one that performs in the most commercials. That the composer John Cage lived not from club entrance fees and spending at the bar, but thanks to song commissions and support from foundations. That the influential jazz pianist Cecil Taylor stopped making a living washing dishes only when he started to be invited to European festivals partially subsidized by states or cities. Some music is simply so different, yet so significant, that it will always need a little help, Ribot wrote.
Almost two decades have passed and this thesis is again valid for high inflation and after the coronavirus pandemic, during which Marc Ribot once again acted as an imaginary protector of musical minorities. At a time when musicians were without income and could not play concerts, he stood patiently in the rain outside the headquarters of the Google company in Manhattan, New York. He handed over to its representatives a petition requesting at least a one percent share of the advertisement that plays on the YouTube server when someone pirates Ribot’s recording there when the clubs are closed. Other signatories of the initiative included renowned composer Laurie Anderson, banjo player Béla Fleck and jazz guitarist Bill Frisell.
Streaming is Ribot’s long-standing theme. “Just download this music for free / We like it / We don’t have homes / We don’t support families / We’re not people like you,” he sang wryly on Masters of the Internet. And when the Spotify platform expanded in 2014, he shared with the New York Times the numbers for his rowdy rock trio Ceramic Dog’s album: while he previously took in up to $9,000 from CD and LP sales, which covered his expenses and lived on for a few months, the streaming company paid him the same he will send not even 200 dollars.
Some of Ribot’s albums are also protest-oriented, including Songs of Resistance, on which in 2018 he collected songs of Italian partisans, Mexican revolutionary ballads and songs associated with the civil rights movement in the USA. He released them as a symbol of resistance to then-President Donald Trump and added original songs with star guests. The most famous one, Tom Waits, sang the originally anti-fascist song Bella ciao, popular today at various demonstrations.
American guitarist Marc Ribot performed in the Czech Republic for the first time in 2009, now he is coming for the sixth time. | Photo: Ebru Yildiz
At the same time, however, Marc Ribot always maintained an overview. On the latest album, with the seven-minute satirical track The Activist, he draws on, among other things, his own activism. In the video clip, he shouts into a megaphone from the comfort of his armchair, which he does not agree with. “I reject my shoes / I reject my age, my hair, my weight, my breath and my face / I reject my language, my faith and my death,” he calculates. Typical Ribot humor.
All this is part of his position on the scene, but the main thing remains the music. The stylistically versatile guitarist and composer has already accompanied singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, jazz pianist Diana Krall, avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn or the duo Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, with whom he recorded the album Raising Sand, which was awarded five Grammys in 2007. But Ribot’s guitar is most firmly connected with singer-songwriter Tom Waits, with whom he has collaborated since the 1980s and whose recordings he shaped, from Rain Dogs to Mule Variations to the latest Bad as Me.
In addition, Ribot has dozens of collaborations to his credit, from the soundtracks for the films Outlaw or Mystery Train directed by Jim Jarmusch, to performing in an important band of the 80s called The Lounge Lizards, to evenings of spoken word, during which he accompanied the beat poet Allen Ginsberg on electric guitar.
In addition, he has already released almost thirty self-titled albums, maintains several lineups in parallel, and although he is more often known by musicians than the general public, it is not so difficult to come across him. For example, in January he accompanied the Gucci fashion show live with the Ceramic Dog trio. The recording, in which Ribot wildly improvises and plucks the strings on an electric guitar, while models walk around him for ten minutes presenting a winter collection of trousers, coats and fur coats, evokes a decadent cabaret.
Ribot is recognizable from afar. First of all, visually: he basically plays sitting down, hunched over, even curled up around the guitar, only now and then he moves his glasses on his nose. Second, get to know them musically. It has an expressive, dirty, battered sound, deliberately imperfect, as if coming from a garage.
This was partly caused by the collaboration with Tom Waits, during which, according to Ribot’s own words, he was looking for such a guitar sound that captured not only the color of the singer’s voice, but also the meaning of the words. At the same time, however, Ribot, who has been playing Gibson L-50 or Fender Jaguar guitars for the past few years, uses a lot of equipment or techniques from the 1950s and 1960s. In last year’s book Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist, he describes how manufacturers at the time were constantly improving amplifiers, making electric guitars sound cleaner and cleaner – to which musicians responded by turning up the volume and choosing more distortion. To make their speech dirty again.
“I always fought with the guitar to make it sound like something else: like a saxophone, like a scream, like a shopping cart rushing down a hill,” compares Marc Ribot.
Tom Waits contributed the Italian anti-fascist song Bella ciao to guitarist Marc Ribot’s Songs of Resistance. | Video: Anti-Records
Nevertheless, whatever he takes in his hand, one recognizes him. At the beginning of the millennium, he did it with the Saints album, deliberately recorded on a cheap guitar for twenty dollars. Even the frequent inclusion of effects such as fuzz or overdrive, with which they have been sparing in recent years, is not the main thing. In the end, it is the way of playing, the musical reasoning that decides.
In this regard, Ribot is quite an intuitive, essentially experimental, in a certain sense constantly improvising type. He combines a charmingly unpredictable choice of notes, commitment, when the solo often begins with maximum drive, knowledge of jazz harmony or odd meters, as well as the principles of twelve-tone music. Into all of this, on the edge of a kind of controlled chaos, Ribot incorporates the sounds of all possible genres, from rock to noise, punk, blues and country to Latin American jazz.
After all, for years he led the Cuban band Los Cubanos Postizos, with which, among other things, he paid tribute to the Haitian guitarist Frantz Casseus. He once taught Ribot – a teenage left-hander with a right-handed instrument – the basics of classical guitar. In the book, the American recalls visiting the Haitian immigrant every Sunday at one in the afternoon. “To my astonishment, he was often still asleep. His apartment smelled of black coffee, wood stain and cigarettes. It resembled a Cubist painting,” he describes in the most engaging chapter, how “written scores and pencils were lying on the table, and ten unsmoked cigarettes in the ashtray, when you took two puffs of each and then forgot about them”. The objects “told the story of someone who composed, who was lost in the solitude of music”, describes the guitarist.
It was the later concern for his teacher Casseus, from whom the American record company kept secret the thousands of dollars in earnings from his music for decades, that led Marc Ribot to musical activism. And just as he finished his studies with Casseus in the late 1970s, he moved to New York, where he got his first short job: accompanying jazz organist Jack McDuff for four months. Marc Ribot is now returning to this era with a project that he will present in the Czech Republic this week.
Guitarist Marc Ribot improvises at an exhibition of works by South African painter Marlene Dumas at Switzerland’s Fondation Beyeler, footage from 2015. | Video: Fondation Beyeler
A band called The Jazz-Bins has been around for a few months and has yet to make a record. From low-quality scraps on the Internet, it seems that, despite the overall rock commitment, it refers precisely to the organ jazz of the 60s. This means the time when, in American clubs, trios or quartets with Hammond organs played music sometimes referred to as soul jazz, strongly anchored in the blues and built on the well-complementing sound of a keyboard instrument with an electric guitar.
The path to this genre was paved by organists Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff, and at the turn of the millennium it was popularized again by younger instrumentalists Joey DeFrancesco, Larry Goldings or, in the Czech Republic, Ondřej Pivec. That’s roughly the framework within which Ribot’s current line-up, which includes organist Greg Lewis and drummer Chad Taylor, operates. But expecting Ribot to honor the genre and repeat what others did decades ago would be against the meaning of the matter. As always, Marc Ribot will surely find his own way.
Concert
Marc Ribot & The Jazz-Bins
(Organized by Rachot Production Agency)
Akropolis Palace, Prague, April 26.
