Marc Ribot

Interview

19

June, 2026

By: Tom Toremans
Photos: Vilma Dobilaite

“I’m just trying to rock the house…” An Interview with Marc Ribot. 

In a career that spans almost four decades, Marc Ribot has played on hundreds of records, both as a collaborator (with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithful, T-Bone Burnett, John Zorn, and many others) and as a solo artist and band leader. He has led punkrock and jazz bands, composed pieces for film and dance performances, and ventured into Jewish, Haitian and Cuban musical traditions.

Today, at 72, Ribot is as productive as ever. In the last few months he has been touring with three different projects: his free jazz quartet Hurry Red Telephone, his punkrock trio Ceramic Dog, and his solo album Map of a Blue City, which was released last year.

We caught up with Ribot while he was taking a short break from this busy touring schedule, back home in New York. We talked about his recent projects, but also about a host of other things, like the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the music of Albert Ayler and Henry Grimes, Hannah Arendt’s reflections on democracy, the politics of improvisation, songs of protest and resistance, musicians’ rights, and his earliest musical formation at age of 11 by Frantz Casseus, the father of Haitian classical guitar.

Since he was right in the middle of touring, I thought a good starting point for our conversation might be the song “Daddy’s Trip to Brazil”, from Map of A Blue City, a song about a tour he did with The Lounge Lizards back in the 80s.

In&OutJAZZ Magazine: “Daddy’s Trip to Brazil” is about life on the road. It’s about a musician who’s on tour in Brazil and he sings: “If you really want to help me out, close the window, call the bell captain and tell him to please do something about the sound of those fucking waves.” So how is touring for you these days?

Marc Ribot: You know, not every character I sing or write is me. I know that may shocking to some people, but I’m a famously unreliable narrator. But let’s just say that that song relates to a tour that I did with the Lounge Lizards in Brazil. I think it was in 1986 or something, I don’t know. The band got so much press that at one point John Lurie was saying to the reporters, don’t you guys have a burning rainforest or something? You know, something to talk about other than us?

The song reminded me of a story that you wrote back in the 1990s, “The 23 Day Tour, which was later included in Unstrung, your book of essays and short stories that was published just a few years ago. It’s a story about the musician on the road and it very dryly enumerates all the places he goes to and all the trains he needs to catch. So also in this story we get this very demystified picture of life on the road.

Oh yeah, that was one of the first stories I wrote. The concept was to not write a story at all, but to just publish my itinerary as a text. When people hear that somebody’s doing a tour for three weeks or three months, they think “Oh, that’s nice”. And it is nice, by the way, I’m not complaining at all. But there’s something about just repeating and actually reading an itinerary that makes you realize that when you change city every day, it’s not just traveling, it’s a very different experience. That story was influenced by a short story by the writer Lynne Tillman, called “Weird Fucks”. And it’s her entire romantic life, you know, like everybody she ever, or at least the character in the story, everybody they ever had slept with. But each one gets the same half page. Exactly. It’s just a factual description of their interaction without any emotional embellishment. And you understand by the end of this story why it can’t go on. It’s not just a collection of stories. You understand why she changes radically at the end; the last story is very different, you know, and you understand the necessity of that.

A lot has already been said about bout your latest solo album, Map of a Blue City, but one of the main things that sets it apart from your previous work, I think, is that both musically and lyrically it’s probably your most contemplative album to date. You sing about the death of your father, about the Holocaust, and about the current global rise of fascism. That contemplative place is evoked very powerfully in the title track, which ends with the narrator on a train platform on the city’s outskirts: “The platform is empty/The train has left the station/I see the ocean and I think I hear a roller coaster.” That seems to evoke the more distanced, contemplative place from which you reflect on life and history, on loss and on being lost on this album?

You express that in a way that I wouldn’t have thought about, but now that I hear it, it sounds right. I mean, the song “Map of Blue City” is written from the perspective of someone who’s extremely disoriented and is maybe speaking to the last person on earth that they could speak to, or maybe they’re speaking when there’s no one there. And they’re just describing what they see because they don’t know where they are. I imagined the place as a particular subway platform at Coney Island.

The title of that song came first. It was inspired by my daughter. When she was about 7 years old, she was into urban design and would draw these very complex maps of cities, where she knew every street, every child-friendly restaurant, the library, the swimming pool, you know, and she knew the name of every dog and cat that lived in every house. And they’d be very intricate maps. And one day she drew one all in blue magic marker. And I said: “Oh, that’s interesting. Why did you draw a blue map?” And she said: “It’s not a blue map, it’s a map of a blue city.” Which makes sense, you know. And I worked backwards from that title to, to get the rest of the tune.

In that sense, it would be tempting to see this album as a typically nostalgic turn in the artist’s later work. The punk rocker turned Buddhist, let’s say. But that’s not really accurate, is it? You actually wrote these songs some time ago, some as early as the 1990s.

Yeah, I was going to say this is a new record, but it’s also an old record. It’s stuff that I started recording in the 1990s. And I don’t know, maybe even before. I mean, for a long time, every now and then I wake up and write a song. Every now and then I feel terrible and on those days something’s going to happen and it’s not clear whether I’m going to jump out of the window, write an essay or write a song. So far it’s come out as essays or songs.

Do you remember what was the first song that you wrote?

Let me see… The earliest one is “For Celia”, which was written in the mid or early 90s, around the same time as “Daddy’s Trip To Brazil” and “Map of a Blue City”. There is a bunch of early stuff on there. Producer Ben Greenberg and I picked these from a lot of different pieces, so there may be some afterbirth of this record, stay tuned…

Another contemplative song on the album is “Sometime Jailhouse Blues”, a poem by Allen Ginsberg that you set to music. In your adaptation, Ginsberg’s lyrics become part of this hauntingly existentialist blues. The narrator sings about “the aimless toil of time” and sort dissociates from himself at the end of the poem, when he sings: “And visioned by the death of mind/My ghost will wander in the air,/And gaze upon a ghostly face,/Not knowing what was fair or lost,/Remembering not what flesh lay waste,/Or made him kind as ghost to ghost.”

Yes, this is a Ginsberg poem that I set as a blues, not very originally, as the title is “Sometimes Jailhouse Blues”. And it is all the things you say. In the references to ghosts, I also hear some Tibetan Buddhism, which would have certainly been within Allen’s imagery and his beliefs. The song draws on blues lyrics and Tibetan Buddhism, and it’s somebody who’s in the jailhouse, but looking at it from the outside, you know, his thoughts are able to wander in the air.

This is not the first time you engage with Ginsberg’s poetry. In the late 1980s, you played on the album The Lion for Real, on which Ginsberg recited his poetry over music by yourself, but also Arto Lindsay, Bill Frisell, Steve Swallow, and many others. And in 1996, you also played on the album The Ballad of the Skeletons, Ginsberg’s final audio recording, which also featured Paul McCartney and Philip Glass. Would you say that Ginsberg has inspired you as a lyricist?

I don’t know, but I hope so. He was the first major poet I ever heard read, when I was 16 or 17. He and his father read in West Orange, New Jersey, at the YMHA, the Jewish community organization. His father was a very nice poet, he used to write a poetry column in the local newspaper, and he somehow scheduled for them to be reading together. Then Allen came on and he read “Kaddish”. It was about 40 minutes, and by the end of everybody just sat there with their mouths open. It was, like, stunning. And I said: “Oh, wow, that’s what this is. That’s what the big deal is about.” And I spoke with him years later when we were recording stuff for The Lion for Real. I told him I’d been at that reading and that it had knocked me out. And he said that it was a very intense reading for him because it was one of the only times he read in that area of New Jersey, which is where his family was from. So he was reading this poem about the madness and lobotomy and death of his mother, Naomi, to people who knew her.

He also told me later that what he and a lot of his contemporaries had in common is that they didn’t use metaphor. Like, you’ll read through all of Ginsberg’s poetry and not read any metaphors. There’s a lot of metonymy. Whatever “ghost” in that poem means, it also just means a ghost, you know? All there is, is an ever widening circle of resonance, things that it triggers. He was very much reacting to and trying to avoid T.S. Eliot’s tradition of poetry, which used a lot of metaphor and a lot of intentionally hidden references. So that was interesting to me. And also the way he was able to manufacture completely his own relation to Jewish thought and to Jewish existence. His own queer Buddhist relation. I thought “Okay, this is a kind of freedom”. And not only for Jewish people, by the way, but for anybody who has ever been tempted to have an identity
Apart from Ginsberg’s lyrics, the haunting quality of “Sometime Jailhouse Blues” is also evoked by the very sound of the song. We hear your fingers sliding across the strings, and creaking in the background, which could be your guitar or the chair you are sitting on. It’s like we can hear the place of solitude that you’re singing this from. And that lo-fi sound pretty much defines the entire album. Can you tell us something more about the production process behind Map of a Blue City?

It started off with a bunch of things I recorded in my home studio, basically my bedroom. I wasn’t trying to be lo-fi. I mean, I used the best mics I could find, but on the other hand, there were certain details, I guess, that I ignored. Like to find a chair that doesn’t creak or something. Another thing I wasn’t very good at was keeping track of my recordings. For a lot of the songs I lost the multi-track recordings. In other words, there was one microphone on the guitar and one mic on the vocal and if I had another instrument, they got their own mic. Each mic has its own track so that at a later time after the recording you can mix it and determine how loud each track is. I couldn’t do that anymore because I couldn’t find the multi-tracks and I presumed I couldn’t use them really. And this is where Ben Greenberg, the producer, came to the rescue. And this is also the only good thing I’ll ever say about artificial intelligence because there are new apps that you can use for track cleaning and for unmixing a mixed tape. It’s fairly miraculous.  Of course I have to put in a caveat here: what makes that an okay use is that I chose to do it and I did it on my own songs. You know, it was not someone making a million dollars by ingesting, stealing, or plagiarizing our work without our permission and without paying us. I’m not a fan of that.

But to go back to this record, first of all, I wanted to use those older recordings because they felt intimate, because they were recorded in my bedroom, not in a giant concert hall or in a perfect recording studio. And they sound like it. Even if I could have added tons of reverb and spent much more time cleaning the tracks and made it sound like it was recorded in a huge concert hall, I didn’t want to. The challenge in fact was not so much in making these recordings sound the way I wanted, as in making the stuff that I’d recorded later in the sessions I did with Hal Wilner feel like it was recorded in that same intimate room.

So would you say that Ben Greenberg as a producer was as important as the other guest musicians on the album?

Yes. Ben has his own band, like a hardcore band called Uniform. And they’re great. This record isn’t what he plays in his own band, it’s very stylistically different. But Ben is a really talented producer. And I want to say something about that too, because people go to a concert because they heard a record. And what they don’t hear or see or know about, unless they really pay a lot of attention, is who produced the record.

Ben was working as an engineer, doing his own band and then kind of producing on the side, because the market for music has been really screwed up by a failure to regulate copyright infringement. People want to believe that it only hurts the big corporations, but it has also hurt talented people like Ben. It has hurt musicians who don’t have tons of money. It’s something we deal with. So a lot of talented people who are producers have not gotten a chance to work and do what they do great because the budgets aren’t there. I’m hoping Ben will prove an exception to this rule. His name is starting to get out there and he well deserves it.

The same raw, intimate sonic atmosphere we also find on some of your earlier albums, and perhaps most notably on Don’t Blame Me. It’s a solo album you released in 1995 and that features a series of your interpretations of (free) jazz pieces on solo electric guitar. In the 2007 documentary film The Lost String by Anaïs Prozaïc, you said the following: “I think that a particular music can be part of more than one history. There’s a certain trend in jazz, starting with Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time band, and Albert Ayler, that can also be written into a history of rock. I’ve tried to imagine a history of rock that includes these musicians.” Can you describe your relation to that jazz tradition a bit more precisely? To what extent do you consider yourself a jazz musician? Or to what extent do you feel that you have been perceived as one?

Recently at the jazz festival in San Sebastian, I was given some kind of award, and it was very interesting for me because I was never sure if I was a jazz musician. I guess, again, it comes back to this question of identity. And it’s an identity that carries with it certain benefits and certain problems. You know, the benefit of getting to play at jazz festivals, but also the problem of appropriation. So it was a claim that I made with difficulty.

But what I can say with no difficulty is that I’ve had huge affection for certain jazz artists and certain jazz composers. I’ve spent a lifetime listening to Thelonious Monk and Albert Ayler and a lot of others, and I feel very close to them. So I’ve tried to work with them, sometimes with their music or sometimes in their tradition. You know, the funny thing about the name “free jazz” is it sounds like “Whoopee, everybody does what they want!” And in fact everybody does. But each free jazz composer also invented systems of improvising. They have their compositions, but also ways of approaching improvisation on these compositions. And I’ve paid a lot of attention to those things.

Albert Ayler especially has been a constant presence throughout your career. In 2005, you recorded an entire album with Ayler compositions with your Spiritual Unity Quartet. In 2001, you released Saints, another solo album, on which you play Ayler compositions like “Saints” and “Witches and Devils”. And I think your first recorded cover of an Ayler composition was “Bells” on the 1994 Shrek album.

Right. And even before that, I mean, you know, playing in the Lounge Lizards, I think Lurie wanted to have Ayler as an influence. And I think Ayler is an influence on some of his solo playing or smaller group playing, but he was much too much of a control freak to really approach what either Ayler or Ornette were doing. But still, it was collective improvising. It was improvising without chord changes in the Lizards. And so playing in that band, you know, I started to listen to actual Ayler and Ornette stuff at that time and it was a good place for all of us in that band to work out some of those ideas.

One of the interesting things about your covers of Ayler’s music, I think, is that, apart from the obvious improvisational explorations of his compositions, there’s also a sense in which you engage with his use of melody. In your versions of “Ghost”, for example, you start from the very simple melody of the song — Ayler once wrote that with this melody, he wanted to play something that people could hum. But then you start transforming and unraveling that melody while you also explore it on a more sonic level. You bend the strings, you play around with different tonalities, and so on.

I hadn’t thought about Ayler in relation to that, but, yeah, Ayler has different ways of relating to melody. In “Bells”, for example, as in “Ghosts”, he sometimes relates to melody in that he’ll do a motif and the improvising doesn’t consist of following chord changes. It consists of working with the motif, playing it, stating it, then messing it up. And then sometimes he’ll repeat melodies. I mean, I see a lot of Ayler’s music as a kind of a diving board for deeper improvisation. On “Bells”, he has these musicians who are trained to respond to a lot of very fast information in bebop, but instead Ayler has them playing a hymn very, very slowly. And when they get to the end, they start again from the beginning. But this is when they get to the end the second time and they go into a repetitive pattern. And this repetition serves as a kind of a diving board. I think it had a psychological effect on the musicians, it enabled them to completely break the relation with the original melody. You know, some kind of mental break with what’s going on. But of course, this mental break isn’t really complete. It’s almost impossible to have no relation with what came before. And so what you get is a much deeper relation with what came before, a much less predictable and less formulaic relation with what came before.

I would also say another thing Ayler does, which is part of his process: he’ll juxtapose melody. He could do very melodic playing, you know, big vibrato. He could have been the corniest sax player of his time. But he’ll intercut it with noise sections. Not just atonal, not just discordant, but noise. There’s a lot of techniques that he uses. And the goal of all of them is to get to a place where you can approach the same music in new ways, where you feel free to do that.

A project that was very closely related to the music of Albert Ayler was your Spiritual Unity Quartet, named after Ayler’s 1964 album. It had Chad Taylor on drums, Roy Campbell Jr on trumpet and Henry Grimes on bass. The quartet released a studio album in 2005 and after the death of Roy Campbell Jr. you continued as a trio and released a live recording, Live at the Village Vanguard, in 2014.  In your book Unstrung, you write that the music you played with these musicians was the most beautiful music you had ever experienced.

I loved working with that band. Roy Campbell Jr. was great and much missed, as is Henry. The band had a long evolution. It was called Spiritual Unity because we were mostly doing Ayler tunes. When I met Henry, I thought it would be a good place to start from a common language by doing tunes that he played on. We were playing in Europe, I can’t remember exactly, it might have been in Umbria. Henry was at this point already not doing well, healthwise. We had started to approach a border, you know, between “Isn’t it nice that Henry’s still working” to “Why are you exploiting this poor old man?”. But two of those gigs were the best music I have ever participated in in my life. The audience had that kind of reaction I described after that Ginsberg reading. They just sat there for a few minutes before anybody could applaud.

Unfortunately we don’t have a recording of these particular performances, but we do have the Live at the Village Vanguard album, which is an amazingly powerful document of the trio. One of the songs you play on that album is “Ol’ Man River”, which Grimes had recorded with Ayler already in 1964 on the Swing Low Sweet Spiritual album (later released as Going Home). Grimes played on that album at the age of 29, and here we hear him revisiting the song with you and Chad Taylor at 70.

Yes, Henry worked with Ayler in the 60s and early 70s and also with pretty much everybody else. He was a very in-demand bass player and then disappeared for over 20 years, maybe longer. And he just lost touch with people, stopped working in music and was living in great poverty in LA. And he was kind of rescued by the woman he later married, Margaret Grimes. And there was a social worker who helped find him. And William Parker also helped quite a bit, gave him a bass when he got back to town.

The song “Ol’Man River” leads back to your comment of reading free jazz into a history of rock. The person who told me to look out for Henry Grimes’ playing was Robert Quine, the pioneering punk rock guitarist who played on Lou Reed’s “Waves of Fear” and on Richard Hell’s first records. He gave me a cassette of the Ayler record Going Home, the only record on which Ayler played hymns. And he said: “Listen to the bass playing on this record”. And I did. Henry did this amazing thing where he was supporting and was doing what a bass player does in that role. But he was also a solo voice as strong as Ayler’s. It was collective improvising without abandoning the supporting role of the bass. It was amazing. Before I ever knew that Henry was still alive, I was playing that track for bass players and saying: “This is what you can do. This is what the bass can do.”

You are currently touring with Hurry Red Telephone, a quartet with Taylor on drums again, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Briggan Krauss on sax. With this band you continue to explore the free jazz idiom. To what extent do you consider free improv as a political act? Would you say that free improvisation is inherently political, both in a sense of what it does musically and on the levels of its production and how it engages its audience?

Well, I’ve been working towards getting Hurry Red Telephone together as a way of continuing working with Chad Taylor. Chad is such an intuitive drummer. He knew what I was going to play before I played it.

And yeah, I think on a very deep level improvisation is indeed political. But I think we also need to keep inventing new forms of this. I think that free jazz has a lot to teach us about democracy precisely to the extent that it in fact has its own processes and forms. The freedom also has agreements between the musicians, agreements on a tradition and agreements on a process between the musicians. I wrote about that in the essay on my collaboration with Susana Baca [also included in Unstrung, TT], who’s like the queen of Black Peruvian music. On a recording we did, I was still learning this Festejo rhythm. What those musicians on her records were into was really counterintuitive for an American, or for someone in the European tradition. I was not so sure I absolutely knew where the “one” was all the time, which is a big no no… So I was talking about the paradox that when I’m playing with free improv players or free jazz players, what can sound like non-communication, in fact involves deep communication. And on this record, where we were creating this spectacle of international brotherhood, it was in fact like I was in a different room, you know. Not to diss the record, by the way; the record wound up great!

So yeah, I think it’s important not to get too comfortable in these things. People showing up at a free improv gig and making the same squawks they were making 35 years ago is not revolutionary, you know. Especially when the actual social reality of the situation is often very structured, let’s say, with some people being the stars and other people, you know, not. I think it’s important to keep questioning these things on every level. On the musical level, but also on that of the business or economics of it. I think one of the most important things that musicians can give politically is not so much what we say as in what we are and how we work. This is important too. What happened to the musicians’ union? Why are the records put out by all these radical musicians non-union? Why are the indie labels that are distributed by major labels non-union? And, you know, people are talking about DIY. Well, DIY is great if you can afford it. But what about the structural racism of putting the cost of making a record, promoting and doing all the things you have to do to have a record come out and be heard on the shoulders of the artist? Who is that excluding and who is that including? What about the profits being made by distributors? What about the profits including digital distributors? What about the profits being made by Google when it brokers ads on infringing files that were posted without our permission and from which we get nothing? Calling attention to those structures is also part of the politics, a way in which musicians can contribute to a dialogue on freedom.

And musically too. I did this one performance, probably about six years ago in Istanbul. And Erdogan had done a lot of very repressive things and airplane stuff got messed up and half the band couldn’t make it over. So I wound up doing the performance with a few people from the band and some local Turkish musicians. But in order to make that happen, I used a lot of conduction. And afterwards I was talking with some young musicians who had been at the concert, and they said: “Yeah, it was okay, but, you know, it was too authoritarian with all this conduction.” And I thought “These kids are great!” You know, just asking these political questions.

That story immediately brings to mind John Zorn and his experiments with improvisational forms and conducting.

Well yes, especially Cobra. Cobra opens up its kind of structured representational democracy because it has no contents. Each person within the rules of the piece can determine the next step that the group is going to take within the language of the piece in practice. There’s a conductor, but ideally the conductor is only reflecting back what the musicians are saying. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s the ideal. And it’s a great piece. A very important piece. It raises questions about whether it matters that the audience doesn’t know what the language is. If the importance of the piece is in its structure. I don’t know. There’s always these questions. And I think it’s important to keep asking these questions.

Such questions about politics and music also bring us to the third project that you’ve been touring with this year, and that is Ceramic Dog, the band you have with Shahzad Ismaily and and Ches Smith. You’ve been working as a trio already for over 18 years now.

Yeah, maybe it’s 19 by now. “Working” might be an exaggeration. You know, we like to hang out, we like each other’s jokes, and every now and then we rehearse.

Perhaps more than any other project, Ceramic Dog is your most politically outspoken one, as in the song “Muslim Jewish Resistance” from the 2018 album Why RU Still Here? It’s a song in which you protest the current global rise of fascism and in which you call out figures like Trump, Netanyahu, Steve Bannon, and many others.

Yeah, today I would do a different cast, including both Trump and Netanyahu, but I’d expand the cast of villains if I was performing it today, to include others on the Israeli cabinet who have basically called for genocide.

You recorded this song back in 2018, and it has lost nothing of its urgency today. Quite on the contrary. As an artist, where do you keep finding the optimism or the conviction to continue writing and performing music in the face of so much violence and injustice?

I always like to quote Antonio Gramsci, who said the proper attitude for a revolutionary in these times is pessimism of the intelligence, but optimism of the spirit. I also think about something that Hannah Arendt wrote in her book On Revolution. She wrote that the part of the US Constitution that refers to the pursuit of happiness really refers to a very old phrase from the Greek and Roman world’s political discussions, which was the pursuit of the public happiness. The idea that you would stand up and speak. Arendt said that in the ancient world, the greatest honor and pleasure that someone could have is when they spoke in the public space. This phrase, “the public happiness” meant not only to increase the happiness of the public, but that this exercise in democratic freedom was itself a form of happiness, of pleasure. In contemporary society, this process of just showing up and voting and pulling the lever on a voting machine is very alienated. But this process of organizing to fight back against these things can also be a kind of happiness. It sounds crazy to say that, because most of it is such a drag, you know, all this boring letter writing. But I think Hannah Arendt was talking about her experience of meeting people. She said that sometimes the public space can shrink to a basement where a resistance group is meeting to decide what to do next. That’s where this exercise in freedom can occur. So, in that sense, I hope to stay as productive as I can.

Is that kind of democratic participation and activism also something you pursue musically?

Also musically, yes. I think musically I do what I can and what I feel like doing. But there’s also kind of a danger in the music thing, because in the music-politics connection there’s a point at which playing and singing radical songs can be a form of marketing to, to a radical niche market. It can be fun, it can be cool. And we all want to make our fans happy and do songs we like, but sometimes it’s not right to mistake that for effective action. And I think that musicians have as much of an obligation to act as –okay I’ll say it— citizens as anybody else, in addition to whatever we feel like doing.

In the same year you released Why RU Still Here with Ceramic Dog, you released the album Songs of Resistance on the label ANTI-Records. That was a very ambitious project in which you brought together a wide range of musicians, including Tom Wades, Syd Straw, Sam Amidon, Fay Victor, Ohene Cornelius, Domenica Fossati, and many others. One actually wonders how you managed to get all these people together.

Well, with enormous difficulty. I think I’m never going to do a multi-artist record again in this lifetime. But, I mean, everybody really rose to the occasion. Just the logistics of getting everybody in the same studio took a lot of running around, you know.

The album was recorded as a direct response to Trump’s first election in 2017. And it’s interesting to notice a shift from protest songs, like the kind you did with Ceramic Dog, to actual songs of resistance. That shift seems to signal a next phase, when fascism has taken over and when protest is no longer sufficient and resistance is called for.

Basically I felt we were dealing with a fascist takeover of the U.S. government – which has since become quite obvious. And we were kind of crossing a threshold between a tradition of protest and a tradition of resistance. So I wanted to explore that borderline and go back to what some of the musics of resistance have been in the past. 

The album contains some protest songs from the past, like the partisan song “Bella Ciao”, which you perform with Tom Waits. But it also features original compositions like “How to Walk in Freedom”, which you do with Fay Victor and Sam Amidon.

Yeah, yeah. So happy I got Fay Victor and Sam Amidon on the same track.

To conclude, I would like to close the circle, as it were. We started out with your most recent solo album, Map of a Blue City. Your very first album dates from 1993 and was called  Marc Ribot Plays Solo Guitar Works of Frantz Casseus. The album takes us back even further because Casseus was your first guitar teacher when you picked up the guitar at the age of 11. And as you found out later, he was actually a pioneer in the development of Haitian classical guitar music.

Yes, and he’s still considered to this day the father of Haitian classical guitar.

And he was still actively involved in the recording of the album, right?

Yes, he had had a stroke, so he was no longer able to play. But he supervised, you know. I would perform the music for him, and he would critique what I was doing.

Apart from the album, you also collected Casseus’ compositions together with Alberto Mesirca in a book called Frantz Casséus Guitar Works.

Yeah, that was assembled after he died. I promised him I’d try to keep his work in print. And there was an earlier attempt, but now there’s a version of the complete works for solo guitar of Frantz Casseus that I co-edited with the great classical guitarist Alberto Mesirca.

You said somewhere in an interview that these lessons that you got from Franz Cassias were the secret to your “so-called style”.

Well, I think I was referring to the fact that I’m actually left-handed, but I play guitar right-handed.

I did wonder about this story that you were actually left-handed but Casseus taught you to play on a right-handed guitar. And there’s conflicting versions as to how this happened.

When I asked Frantz why he didn’t restring the guitar and turn it around, he told me “Well, it was your mother. She said that you’re not really left-handed, and you’re just doing it to annoy her.” And then when I asked my mother about it, she said “No, Frantz, just was too lazy to restring the guitar. And he said, don’t worry, the kid will quit in a few weeks anyways.” I think they were both telling the truth, you know, but in fact, as I’ve come to learn, I play guitar with both hands. So it all worked out fine in the end.

So would you say there’s any truth to this claim that this early formation also formed your style in the sense that you learned how to work creatively with certain technical obstacles?

Yes, I think it was. Whether it’s for that or some other reason, I’ve never been like the fastest guitarist on the block. I joke with Mary Halvorson because for a while we were going to the same gym, and not only does she play faster than me, but she even swims faster than me. That’s just the way it is. But you know, because of this and also because I played classical style, I didn’t learn to play with the pick till I was in my 20s. And what would happen is that I would play really well for the first 20 minutes and then I’d break all my fingernails off and play really slowly. So this made me listen more to people who had a lot of economy in their playing, like B.B. king, Chuck Berry, Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, you know, people who use space and economy in their play.

One final question. In “For Celia”, on Map of a Blue City, you reference the Lore-Ley poem by the German romantic poet Heinrich Heine. It’s the poem about a nymph on the cliff overlooking the Rhine river singing a song that lures sailors to their deaths on the rocks below. At the conclusion of the song you sing “It’s just romantic German bullshit/You can’t redeem yourself by weeping/The sailors drifting in the water/the ones who tried to find a narrative.” So do you have a sense that looking back on four decades of making and performing music, there’s a narrative to be found there, some kind of story? Or is that romantic bullshit?

I don’t want to get like captured in the whirlpool, you know. Well, I mean, there probably is one, but I don’t know what it is. I’m just trying to rock the house!