Marc Ribot – A Portrait

Text: Tom R. Schulz, 22.07.2024

Translation: Robert Smales

His playing technique is incredible, and there is nothing about music theory he doesn’t know. The fingers of his left hand run across the fingerboard as if by remote control, and yet always with absolute purpose. He doesn’t hold a plectrum in his right hand, instead plucking the strings with his bare fingers, and even with his thumb, like a concert guitarist. Hardly anybody does that on the electric guitar. Even though he reaches record-breaking speeds, nothing makes him break out in a sweat.

Matteo Mancuso, 27 years old and the son of a guitarist from Palermo, is currently the phenomenon par excellence in the guitar world. A world that has been densely populated by exceptional players for at least sixty years, and increasingly so by female players as well. Rock guitarist Steve Vai calls Mancuso the future of the electric guitar. A host of other renowned professionals is also raving about him as the new revelation. Even Al Di Meola, the hyper-virtuoso of fusion jazz who has always been entirely convinced of his own grandiosity.

Somewhere between jazz, rock, noise and protest songs, Marc Ribot has evolved into a guitar legend. In his Reflektor Festival, he presents his incredibly diverse band projects over the course of three days.

His technique, on the other hand, looks like work. Marc Ribot, 42 years older than Mancuso, still struggles with every note he articulates. Coolness, even elegance when playing? He doesn’t care. Instead, the grand master of noise music, who plays sitting down most of the time, often brings his head so close to the body of the instrument that the two sometimes seem to blur into one. Even notes that sound askew and out of place, he plays with intent and force – in fact, especially those notes. What are real notes after all? Correct tones – says Marc Ribot in a beautiful film about him by a French director (»La corde perdue«, 2007) – make up five percent of what matters when playing. The remaining 95 percent is the semiotic context. Apparently.

Tempo on the guitar, for the purpose of impressing? When he puts his mind to it, he can be pretty fast, but in a contest against Matteo Mancuso he would have no chance. Which doesn’t matter, because Marc Ribot would never get himself involved in a race like that anyway, thinking it completely absurd. And Mancuso would be best to steer away from one too. He would be the hare, Ribot would be the tortoise.

Marc Ribot combines the rawness of punk, the cleverness of jazz, the irrepressible desire to play around fifty other types of music, and the sensitivity of an artist who hasn’t been able to smooth out all the roughness of life. As with Mancuso, the history of the instrument naturally resonates with him, but his horizon is more »From Hank to Hendrix«, as Neil Young once described his own.

Ribot is a master of the art of the scrunchy rock guitar without ever lapsing into what would be described as bad playing. But he is also a terrific minimalist. »La corde perdue« begins with a scene from a club concert in France, where he is performing as a solo guitarist. Over the course of several minutes, he celebrates finely balanced noise in slow motion and it instantly casts a spell over you. A few notes of G minor held for a long time and found as if by chance – recorded not only by the pickups of the electric guitar but also by a contact microphone that Ribot holds in his right hand close to the strings, and sonically intensified by a few effect devices that he operates with his foot – create a sound with enormous hypnotic force. A sound that grows into the room like a sculpture of slow-flowing, immaterial lava and fills every last corner of it. Pure contemporary art that appears at least to be freely improvised.

In another instant, the fingers of his left hand knead the fingerboard in an enduring feat of strength, in order to wrest a capricious figure from it, consisting of only a few angular, repetitive notes. He wrings these few notes with a bone-crushing intensity, as if the very last drop needed to be extracted from an already squeezed lemon.

Nothing gets away with Marc Ribot. Everyone can see and hear that he is not a technical machine and that instead he models his sounds with rough blocks, rough wedges and, above all, with a conscience. He uses a plectrum as well as his fingers when he plays, his chord technique obeying him blindly. Ribot is perhaps the most sculptural sound producer the electric guitar has ever seen. A sculptor of sound.

Watching Matteo Mancuso play makes you want to hang up your own instrument. In technical terms he is just so unattainably good. When you see Marc Ribot play, you immediately want to take it down from the wall again and feel emboldened to try something on it that you haven’t dared to do before. Ribot is inspiring because he lacks all the Gustav-esque quality of technically polished guitarists. His aesthetic is that of a music of poverty that rises from the dirt, not to somehow »make it« somewhere, to switch out the dirt for luxury and never turn back to the past. Rather, because dignity demands that people rise from their humiliation by their own efforts. That he does not resign himself to the resistance, but makes it productive instead, because then he feels better.

»My relationship with the guitar is like a battle,« writes Ribot in his wonderfully headstrong book »Unstrung«. »I’m constantly forcing it to be something else – a saxophone, a scream, a cart rolling down a hill. Sometimes she obeys. Sometimes I give up and play surf music (which is what all electric guitarists want anyway). Surf music is fine, for a while. But then something happens that cries out for translation, and then it all starts all over again... Guitars don’t mind fighting. Guitars are struggle. I’ve lived with guitars for a long time. I’ve bent them into shape. And they have bent me.«

If the boy from Orange in New Jersey, the state opposite New York on the other side of the Hudson River, hadn’t been fitted with braces back in the day, he would probably have continued on playing the trumpet. But this wasn’t possible with braces, so Marc Ribot started playing the guitar instead at the age of eleven. A family friend, Frantz Casseus, gave him lessons every Sunday afternoon in his small Manhattan apartment, which was crammed full of stuff. He was the only teacher Ribot ever had.

Frantz Casseus had come to New York City from Haiti in 1946 and played a beautiful, idiosyncratic, complex yet not very virtuosic kind of music – combining Haitian folk melodies and dance rhythms with elements of classical music, similar to what Heitor Villa-Lobos had previously done with Brazilian music. The pinnacle of his success in the USA came when Harry Belafonte covered his song »Merci Bon Dieu«. Health problems and the withholding of publishing rights caused him some grave difficulties however.

Marc Ribot’s mother Harriet put Casseus’ finances in order in the end. And Ribot himself stepped into the breach for his teacher when he was barely able to play due to a tendon malaise in his hands. During the final years of Casseus’ life, Ribot recorded much of the music for acoustic guitar that his teacher had composed, at his request. »Although I’d studied guitar with Mr. Casseus,« Ribot writes in the Liner notes, »my own development (or perhaps my regression) has taken me quite a distance from these studies.«

Indeed, as far back as the early 1980s, Ribot had already achieved legendary status in an entirely different aesthetic field – as one of the most dazzling representatives of noisemaker music of New York provenance. But on the new album »Marc Ribot plays solo guitar works by Frantz Casseus«, released in 2021 and supplemented with several bonus tracks, the sound sculptor Ribot traces the poetic and playful flow of his teacher’s music with a fine line, rich in subtle nuances and free of all rebellion. The album was a labour of love. It reveals much of the integrity of the character musician Marc Ribot, who in 2012, along with Alberto Mesirca, also produced the sheet music for many of Casseus’ works.

Back when Marc Ribot was the same age as Matteo Mancuso is today, at 27, he was a member of the Realtones, the backing band for the soul star Solomon Burke, as well as other US pop heroes including the likes of Wilson Pickett and Chuck Berry. Four years later, in 1985, he played a key part in Tom Waits’ album »Rain Dogs«. On the previous album »Swordfishtrombones« (1983), Waits – for many the Charles Bukowski of American song – had already promoted himself as a diseur in the style of cabaret noir and experimentally orchestrated songs à la Kurt Weill, delighting fans of extravagant music.

Waits does not feature in Ribot’s book »Unstrung«. In lieu of this, there is an especially touching musical document featuring Waits and him on the great album »Songs of Resistance 1942-2018«. This record was Ribot’s attempt to counter his impotent rage over the election of Donald Trump as US president with the power of political resistance songs. The way Waits intones the old partisan song »Bella Ciao« with his badly thinning fighter’s organ, unembellished by any technical cosmetics, to sparingly arranged sounds on the guitar, banjo and harmonica, may well bring tears to the eyes of faint-hearted listeners.

»Ribot writes and plays freewheeling music. He never suppresses a single one of his musical impulses. But never lets one single instinct take over the wheel either. You could say that his humour meets very high moral standards.« Marc Ribot owes this characterization to a member of his chosen family, the guitarist and singer Arto Lindsay, who, with his splinter-sharp broken-glass sounds on the electric guitar, is even more intellectual and deconstructivist than Ribot himself. At the same time though, he sings the most beautiful, tender bossa songs with a bell-like tenor voice.

The »high moral standards« of Ribot’s humour, which include his particular style of wit, certainly has something to do with his Jewish roots. One great-grandfather was a rabbi in a small town near Minsk in Belarus, Ribot reports, and »my grandparents lost brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts in the Holocaust«. While Marc Ribot doesn’t live out his Jewish identity in an orthodox way, he does so in a very conscious way.

He was one of the formative figures of Radical Jewish Culture, an art movement in 1990s New York that centred around the Knitting Factory on the Lower East Side and whose figurehead was the saxophonist John Zorn. Ribot is still part of the illustrious cosmos of Zorn musicians. He will never forget how he chiselled some of Zorn’s sharp-edged musical miniatures out of his guitar during his »Bagatelles Marathon« a few weeks after the opening of the Elbphilharmonie in March 2017, under the ecstatic conducting of the composer who was literally almost sitting on his lap.

Being versatile and yet remaining inimitable – Ribot’s old buddies joining him on his »Reflektor« adventure at the Elbphilharmonie also excel in this aesthetic discipline. He has been associating with some of them for decades. And he has revived his legendary bands Rootless Cosmopolitans and Los Cubanos Postizos especially for this festival. Anthony Coleman plays keyboards in both, just as he did 30 years ago, cultivating his very own terrain between abstraction, blues and groove. An eminently clever comrade-in-arms of Ribot from the days of Radical Jewish Culture, and not just in a musical sense either.

The two drummers Ches Smith and Chad Jones, who can be heard in four bands featuring at the »Reflektor«, are genuine prodigies when it comes to precision and unpredictability. The bassist and electronic musician Shahzad Ismaily subverts all expectations of the conventional role of an accompanist with his endless ideas and mysterious sound inventions. Ribot is also bringing three strong improvisers to Hamburg, in the form of Tomeka Reid, Mary Halvorson and Silvia Bolognesi. They are all likely to go down a storm with all those who love the unconventional and appreciate the discipline of true free spirits.

This article appeared in Elbphilharmonie Magazine (issue 3/24)