While there are plenty of guitarists in the world, none of them sound quite like Marc Ribot. Since his early-’80s ascent on the New York scene, the idiosyncratic instrumentalist’s bent, spiky, questing style has been a beacon shining over a flat landscape of tired, six-string cliches—no wonder Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, John Zorn, and other artists have enlisted him when they’ve wanted to bring something different to their music. And then there’s Ribot’s own music, which explores everything from free jazz to rock, avant noise, and ethnic folk-roots styles. His explorations will be in full effect on February 22, when the Marc Ribot Quartet holds forth at Hudson Hall.
Perhaps surprisingly, the influential guitarist began his musical career on a different instrument. “I started playing trumpet when I was really young,” says the New Jersey-born musician via phone. “I had an Italian American [music] teacher who taught me ‘Carnival of Venice’ and all of these other traditional repertoire tunes. But then I discovered Keith Richards. And Hendrix, of course.” While playing in rock bands as a teenager, Ribot, who is left-handed but adapted to play right-handed, took guitar lessons from an early mentor, Haitian classical guitarist, composer, and Harry Belafonte sideman Frantz Casseus (he’d later record several of Casseus’s compositions). In 1978 he moved to New York, where the post-punk no wave movement was in full flight, and began making his name in the experimental scene, first with the Realtones (who went on to back soul legend Solomon Burke) and next with downtown “fake jazz” institutions the Lounge Lizards, who he joined in the mid-1980s.
Ribot’s worldwide map placement came in 1985, when Waits tapped him as a session player. He would be Waits’s musical foil on that year’s Rain Dogs, a transitional album during the development of the gravel-voiced iconoclast’s trademark dark, experimental junkyard sound. He also appears on Waits’s Franks Wild Years (1987), Big Time (1988), Mule Variations (1999), Real Gone (2004), Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006), and Bad as Me (2011) and on Costello’s Spike (1989), Mighty Like a Rose (1991), and Kojak Variety (1995). Work with artists ranging from Wilson Pickett to Alan Ginsberg and the Black Keys would follow.
So would the amazing work of his own projects, such as the Rootless Cosmopolitans, Los Cubanos Postizos, Shrek, the Young Philadelphians, the Albert Ayler repertoire band Spiritual Unity, the jazz/punk unit Ceramic Dog, and an eponymously named trio with Ayler bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Chad Taylor. A recent highlight of Ribot’s discography is 2018’s Songs of Resistance 1942-2018, a timely (and now timely again) set of vintage and original political resistance songs with Waits, Meshell Ndegeocello, Steve Earle, Tift Merritt, and other guest singers. The incarnation of the Marc Ribot Quartet slated for the Hudson show features Taylor, bassist Sebastian Steinberg (Soul Coughing), and guitarist Ava Mendoza (Violent Femmes, tUnE-yArDs).
“[The quartet] started out as jazz project, but the music goes wherever it wants to go—we’re not able to stay within genre boundaries,” Ribot explains. “When we toured last summer, I thought we sounded like a cross between Mingus, the Lounge Lizards, Anthony Braxton, Xenakis, and late-period Shrek. But whatever we do, we want it to kick ass.”
The Marc Ribot Quartet will perform at Hudson Hall in Hudson on February 22 at 7pm. Hurry Red Telephone will open. Tickets are $19-$60.
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This article appears in February 2025.
