Guitarist Marc Ribot has been a sideman for Wilson Pickett, Elvis Costello, Brother Jack McDuff, Tom Waits (with whom he performed earlier this week, at Waits’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), and many others. You can hear him on Raising Sand, the dreamy, atmospheric 2009 Grammy winner (Album of the Year, Record of the Year, etc.) by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant.
If you follow jazz, especially jazz guitar, you know about his years with the Lounge Lizards, his bands Shrek, Los Cubanos Postizos, Spiritual Unity (which performs music by Albert Ayler and includes Ayler’s former bassist Henry Grimes), Sun Ship (a Coltrane project), and Ceramic Dog, and his recordings for John Zorn’s label Tzadik.
On Saturday, Ribot brings one of his current projects to the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis: a live solo guitar score, performed to a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s silent film The Kid (1921). He’s out with so many projects and bands, traveling to so many places, that looking at his tour schedule makes me dizzy.
I caught up with him by phone at the San Francisco airport on Thursday morning, March 17. The line stayed open and we kept talking until he boarded the plane and began looking for space in the overhead bins.
“A while ago,” Ribot said at the start of our conversation, “I hadn’t imagined that at this point in my life I would be running around this much. I had imagined there would be something called record royalties.”
PLE: A lot of jazz musicians are playing live music to silent films. Recently Dave Douglas (Spark of Being with filmmaker Bill Morrison), Wycliffe Gordon (Body and Soul), Wynton Marsalis (Louis), Kelly Rossum (Jekyll and Hyde), and now there’s Bill Frisell’s new project with Morrison (The Great Flood). John Zorn has done this for years. He brought his band Electric Masada to Minneapolis in 2006 and played live music to experimental American films from the Walker’s collection.
Marc Ribot: I was part of the band that night.
PLE: I thought you probably were. What brought you to this type of project?
Marc Ribot: I started thinking about it years ago, in the early 1990s, when there was a series at the Knitting Factory called “Loud Music with Silent Films.” That was also around the time of [Bill] Frisell’s Buster Keaton project. I scored a Soviet science fiction movie called Aelita: Queen of Mars. At another point, I did something totally illegal. I wanted to make a political commentary on [a major motion picture Ribot prefers not to name]. So I re-edited it into a 17-minute version and turned off the sound. My version was less edifying and mercifully shorter. One of my big discoveries: They’re all silent movies if you turn off the sound.
