Marc Ribot: A Beginner's Guide

Guitarist Marc Ribot came to prominence as part of the explosion of creativity that took place in New York’s downtown music scene in the 1980s. As a key member of No Wave groups such as The Lounge Lizards and Rootless Cosmopolitans, he helped forge that milieu’s uncompromising fusion of punk, jazz and noise rock. He’s recorded extensively with Tom Waits on several of the singer’s more experimental albums, beginning with 1985’s Rain Dogs. He’s worked as an in-demand sideman for a host of jazz, soul and R&B heavyweights, including Allen Toussaint, Wilson Pickett and organist Brother Jack McDuff, while remaining at the cutting edge of the avant-garde, whether playing with saxophonist John Zorn or leading his post-rock power trio, Ceramic Dog.

But, throughout, he’s also maintained an ongoing fascination with musical styles from around the world. This November, he’s appearing at the London Jazz Festival with his long-running project Los Cubanos Postizos – The Prosthetic Cubans – which, since the late 1990s, have been cooking up energetic party vibes based around arrangements of legendary Cuban bandleader and son montuno pioneer Arsenio Rodríguez. “One of the reasons I started Los Cubanos Postizos was because I was bad at Latin music, and I wanted to get inside it,” he explains. “When you live in downtown New York, it’s all around you. It’s playing from your neighbour’s stereo, in the streets, in the bodega. It’s all over the place. So, I started to check out Cuban music in particular. But I didn’t want to do the hipster thing of claiming that I really was born in Puerto Rico or came up in El Barrio. So, we’re the fake Cubans.”

Even so, there’s been a genuine Afro-logical slant to his music from the start. Aged ten, he began studying under Haitian classical guitarist, composer and family friend Frantz Casseus. “He was probably the first live music I ever heard,” Ribot recalls. “He used to come to family events, and I guess he was bored, so he would play guitar. I thought it was amazing. In his music, you can hear very much an Afro-Caribbean influence, and that soaked into my own playing. But it took me a long time to realise that not everybody hears these poly-rhythms. Every time I’m playing in four-four, there’s a three-four struggling to get out, just below the surface. It’s just natural to me.”

Since those beginnings, Ribot has been associated with some major stars of global music. In the late 1980s, he worked with Brazilian tropicália originator Caetano Veloso: “He’s just like any other super smart, nice, gracious, musical genius,” Ribot jokes. “If you want to hear Caetano sing, listen to a record, because you go to the concerts and he’s so well-loved that all the Brazilians just sing and shout along with it. You can’t hear him sing at all.” Starting in 2000, Ribot played on six albums by Italian singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela, culminating in 2012’s Greek-influenced Rebetiko Gymnastas “He’s a great lyricist and super adventurous musician, who’s been very brave in his experimenting,” says Ribot. “If he hears rembetika, he goes to Greece, he finds the cats and records with them. He wants [Texan accordionist] Flaco Jiménez on his record, he calls Flaco Jiménez. I guess that’s how he got me.”

Another fruitful collaboration has been with Peruvian singer-songwriter Susana Baca, beginning with the album Eco de Sombras in 2000, the first of three recorded for the Luaka Bop label that Ribot played on. “That band was some of the best musicians I ever worked with anywhere,” he enthuses. “With that first record, I went into the studio to overdub my guitar, and I thought the basic tracks with Susana and the band were so great that – this was the only time in my life I ever did this – I called the producer and said ‘I’ll give you your money back. You don’t need my tracks on this. This is a brilliant record. I don’t want to fuck it up.’ But Susana was like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Marc, I’ll just dance and you’ll understand!’ So, I did it, and she liked it. I wasn’t going to argue with Susana. If she wants it there, it’s hers!”

Self-deprecation aside, it’s clear from all these encounters that Ribot takes an inquisitive delight in accompanying vocalists of varying styles. “Whatever I play,” he says, “whether the vocalist is in the room or not, it’s all about making the lyric and the vocal make sense. I don’t always want it to make the same sense as the vocalist. You can really change the meaning of a tune.” Does he feel he’s able to retain his individual style across these varied settings? “I don’t want to have a style,” he demurs. “To the extent that I have a style, it’s because I’m either lazy or it’s my limitations that you’re hearing as my style. All I’m trying to do when I work with other musicians is do something that makes sense with them. Beyond that, I don’t want to have a style. I want to rock the house and make people see God, or whatever.”

Just before appearing in London this November, Ribot will perform at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, revisiting early works, including his avant-garde 1994 album Shrek. While it’s a chance to dust off his more experimental impulses, the commission has also been an opportunity to reignite another musical love. “I’ve been realising how Balkan-influenced some of that music was,” he says. “At the time, [pianist and downtown collaborator] Anthony Coleman was married to a Serbian woman, and we were listening to a bunch of Croatian stuff with [notoriously loud reed instrument] zurna. I’m a huge fan. One of my favourite records is the wedding music of Krk [Music from the Island of Krk, Yugoslavia]. It’s great stuff, especially compared to wedding music in the US. I think the divorce rates would be much lower if all weddings had two zurnas as the band.”

+ Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos play EFG London Jazz Festival on November 18