Marc Ribot (Newark, USA, 1954) does not like to be reminded of his 69 years, on the way to 70, “it is what happens when you have not died, although in the end this is the last alternative,” he comments. on the other side of the screen from Trieste, the imperial city on the Adriatic where he likes to spend long periods of time. From there he will leave shortly to participate in the Terrassa Jazz Festival (March 15, 10 p.m.) accompanied by Nick Dunston and Chad Taylor, successors of the Spiritual Unity Project that started in 2005 to honor the free jazz of saxophonist Albert Ayler. “I use the guitar, but in my head I'm playing a saxophone,” he comments about an evening in which the trio will put themselves in the hands of improvisation to explore new paths, the only destination that seems possible for the projects led by the veteran guitarist. , who throughout his career has collaborated with artists such as Jack McDuff, Wilson Picket, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits, with whom he created the brilliant Rain Dogs.
Despite his regret, Ribot has become the oldest of the trio after Nick Dunston took over from Henry Grimes ("no one can replace Henry Grimes," he remembers), after the bassist's death in the first onslaught of the covid. “Improvisation is very democratic, it doesn't matter your age or how many records you've sold in the past, everything goes out the window and there are only three or four people left creating sounds.” This essential idea of what music is is the best – perhaps the only – definition of the style of the guitarist who made his first steps in the New York post-punk scene, with free jazz performances in venues such as CBGB. “There's a certain kind of intensity that I'm looking for, and that I can feel in the punk rock bands of the early '70s, or in Brother Jack McDuff playing the organ on a good night in Newark. And certainly when I listen to the music of Albert Eiler or the people who continue that tradition today.”
Born in a majority black city although raised in a white residential neighborhood, Ribot recognizes in rock and jazz roots that he later mixed with punk, both in sound and especially in attitude, but that have not affected his devotion to free. “The difference between these genres is the way in which they hear the eight note”, the eighth note, the value so often used by free jazz references, the basis for the change in the direction of tempo that occurred in the time of Count Basie. “But even more important is the relationship of these musicians with time,” he comments, and explains how in classical jazz “you have the feeling that people have all the time in the world to reach the end of the solo, even if it is in a 12-bar blues.”
In rock, on the other hand, “if you put Ike Turner as a starting point, when he did a solo it seemed like he was in a huge hurry to get to the end. Even if the solo lasts 8 minutes, and that is common to many rock people, there is an urgency to get to the end before something terrible happens.” “There are good young musicians who can play perfectly in Count Basie's style,” he reflects, “but it is something they have learned and perfected, and I think there is something bigger than all of us that is what pushed those people to play with this different sense of time. It is an ontological question, not an aesthetic one.”
His first teacher, at age 11, was Frantz Casseus, a Haitian classical guitar master and, more importantly for this story, a friend of his uncles. “I imagine I needed to give classes,” so he taught Ribot to play in the classical discipline, although the young student's goal was to emulate Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones since he couldn't play the trumpet like Miles Davis because his orthodontics bothered him. . “The first song I played was not by Bach or Albéniz, but Dylan's Masters of War, that bitter minor ninth chord sounded very good, so I took what Casseus taught me and went to play with my friends' band in a New Jersey garage, the rest is history.”
It was because of his learning that he began to play with his right hand being left-handed, “when I was 20 years old I realized that I couldn't play as fast as the other kids, and I asked Frantz why he had taught me like that: It was Something about your mother, he answered me, she told me that he wasn't really left-handed." Ribot asked his mother the same thing, who gave him another version: Casseus was too lazy to change the order of the strings, and he thought that in a few weeks you would get tired of playing anyway. His conclusion with the perspective of time, and now being an ambidextrous guitarist, is that “they were both right.”
