A return to the solo acoustic peregrinations of 1998’s Don’t Blame Me, Marc Ribot’s recent Saints (Atlantic) likewise takes standards and contemporary compositions as conceptual springboards for wending, warped sound-art that realizes the potential sonic surprise hidden in the corners of every melodic digression, missed note, and false start. What Ribot does with his arrangements of such traditional pieces as “Go Down Moses” parallels his instrumental attack, actualizing peripheral parts of the guitar that others might only hit on accidentally — for example, using the body as a treasure trove of percussive possibility, plinking and plunking out harmonic netherscapes from sections of the strings not (necessarily) meant for strumming, setting pickups along the fingerboard to catch incidental scratches and hangnail-sustain shakes, and extending the use of plastic or fingernail pick to tools and toys.


This composition-instrumentation parallel further plays itself out between studio recording and live performance, as Ribot’s latest CD suggests potential tracks that are made kinetic on stage. A full house at the Old Town School receives him pleasantly enough as he sets himself immediately to business without introduction. At a stool surrounded by effects-processing units, unexplained gadgets, and pedals with red and blue balloons attached, Ribot launches into a bent melody that wavers in the air as he hits bass strings for rhythmic suggestion while dynamically twisting arms and hands around the guitar body to scrape, slide, and screech accents out of the instrument, alternating between meditative moments and chaotic inspiration that draws chuckles and muffled cackles from the audience.
Ribot elicits this response from the crowd as brief relief from the hushed, painstaking attention that the music sometimes demands. This is the equivalent of an extended Jim Jarmusch scene, where nothing really happens except for the limping verisimilitude of lived experienced in all its poignant, pregnant emptiness that nods off and then slaps back into consciousness.Throughout the show, he keeps the tune — whether a Django Reindhardt composition or Lennon/McCartney’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” — on its toes.
During a rendition of a piece from John Zorn’s Book Of Heads, he uses the balloons for busting effect and to squeak tones against the strings. A recital of “Our Love Is Here to Stay” has him delicately pattering out the lyrics with his voice as apparatus rather than music box, making the lyrics sound more like a warning of disaster than confessional affection. It’s the kind of settling-into versus shocking-out-of play that one would expect from such a versatile musician, whose backup work with Tom Waits, Susana Baca, and Elvis Costello gives just a taste of skill that translates into such projects as his Cubanoid homage to big-band composer and traditional tres-player Arsenio Rodriguez.
Despite a palpable sense of restlessness, the audience sticks around with applause for an encore that seems a trickster-nod to Ribot’s garage roots, jangling out an abrasive rhythm-guitar duel between different noise effects. With daring and humor, he pulls off the most important play — between technique and entertainment.
19 October 2001, Illinois Entertainer

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