Ribot

On their 5th studio album, Connection, Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog have pushed their long-brewing tension between traditional pop songcraft and avantgarde improvisational music to the breaking point, bridging their customary genre-agnostic approach with elements of glam boogie, minimalist disco, psychedelic boogaloo, garage-punk-against-the-machine agitprop, and so much more.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma, G. Calvin Weston, Mary Halvorson, Marc Ribot: 4 professional, harmolodic noise improvisers with an uncommon love of Philly soul and hard groove. Forever young, forever Philadelphian, forever fixated on the moment before dance went digital. Stuck in the groove like a scratch in your favorite record. Ladies and Gentlemen…the hardest working musicians in punk/funk/soul/noise: The Young Philadelphians!!!

When these recording sessions began in the last week of May 2020, I hadn’t left my house to go anywhere other than the grocery store in over two months. I hadn’t taken a cab or subway. I’d lost several friends to COVID-19, and was afraid I’d also lose more thanks to the non-response of our would-be dictator/“president”, whose deliberate embrace of untruth fed tens of thousands of lives to the pandemic, and also reduced what little hope was left for avoiding global warming catastrophe.

Shahzad’s lungs are all fucked up, so we didn’t get together till the end of May, even though he lived right upstairs from the studio. Ches was looking after his kid (Zane) while Miya worked, and I was walking around my apartment talking to myself and eating beans out of tin cans (with salsa and soy sauce on special occasions). But eventually we came up with a plan. Shahzad would set up all the mics before we arrived, then go into the control room and shut the door.

The mastery and vision of the enduring Marc Ribot shine through on this release. Although there have been many attempts to produce authentic indigenous music of various cultures, most have fallen short; this album succeeds in the wake of failure. Ribot delves deep into Cuban rhythms, and indeed the album is a tribute to the Cuban master Arsenio Rodriguez. Here Ribot finds an authentic Cuban sound employing traditional instrumentation: upright bass, wood blocks, cherke, and other percussion sounds. The performance is inspired, and the band consistently tears through Rodriguez's material, as well as some of their own. Ribot's guitar work nears perfection, and he proves himself to be the most soulful white alive. Songs like "Aqui Como Alla" and "Postizo" confirm these assertions.

Marc Ribot - Exercises In Futility (2008) {Tzadik TZ 8046}
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© 2008 Tzadik | TZ 8046 | Tzadik Composer Series
Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Experimental / Guitar

Heretical new music for solo guitar composed and performed by the radical maverick Marc Ribot, who has worked with everyone from Elvis Costello, Maryanne Faithful and Tom Waits to Bill Frisell and Sun Ra. Conceived as impossible etudes and exercises on a variety of finger busting guitar techniques, this astonishing suite will forever change your concept of what the guitar is capable (or not capable) of. Also included are a variety of compositions for solo guitar, making this the definitive collection of Ribot’s expressive and virtuosic solo music. Twisted, mangled and tortured, this instrumental tour-de-force is musical sacrilege at its best.

Marc Ribot - Live At The Village Vanguard (2014) {Pi Recordings PI 53}
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© 2014 Pi Recordings | PI 53
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Experimental / Guitar

It might be more concise to list what musical genres Marc Ribot hasn't explored than the ones he has, but his approach to the guitar has often reflected the freedom, reinvention, and elastic boundaries of jazz, no matter what the specific context. On this date, recorded in mid-2012 during a handful of shows at one of New York's most iconic venues, Ribot gives himself the luxury of stretching out with a pair of gifted accompanists, bassist Henry Grimes (who worked with Albert Ayler, one of Ribot's key influences) and drummer Chad Taylor (a veteran of the Chicago Underground Duo and Trio), and the result is one of Ribot's most explicitly jazz-focused dates in some time.

Marc Ribot - Spiritual Unity (2005) {Pi Recordings PI15}
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© 2005 Pi Recordings | PI15
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Structured Improvisation / Guitar

Guitarist Marc Ribot, formerly of the Lounge Lizards and sometime partner of Marianne Faithfull, Tom Waits and John Zorn, has been involved in his share of unusual projects, but this one might be the most unexpected: a tribute to the late saxophonist Albert Ayler's music of the 1960s. The band catches the group's rough-hewn, trancelike sound with uncanny accuracy, with Ayler's bassist, Henry Grimes, back in action for the project at age 70. But this is no sentimental tourist trip: it's an attempt to reignite the transported atmosphere that the old band discovered through a mix of simple materials, church- and street-music, blues and selfless free-fall interplay.