{"id":32319,"date":"2016-03-28T10:00:47","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T16:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=32319"},"modified":"2016-03-17T16:29:46","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T22:29:46","slug":"marc-ribo-part-three-when-irony-wears-thin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/marc-ribo-part-three-when-irony-wears-thin\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Ribot, Part Three: When Irony Wears Thin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe melancholic music of Negro American folk origin, the blues emerged slowly at the turn of the 19th<\/sup> century from Texas, Louisiana, the Piedmont and Mississippi Delta, a rural music that captured suffering, anguish and hope \u2026\u201d <\/em>The Encyclopedia of Call & Response<\/span><\/p>\n

If you know the guitarist Marc Ribot<\/strong>\u2013who recently cut an LP in Los Angeles with the singer\/songwriter Tift Merritt <\/strong>– you know that he often skates along the boundary between dissonance and noise .<\/span><\/p>\n

The Gordons<\/strong> \u2013 mother Lorraine<\/strong> and daughter Deborah<\/strong>, proprietors of the Village Vanguard in New York City \u2013 were well aware. They were also fans, with Deborah inviting Ribot to play her mother\u2019s fabled Seventh Avenue club after seeing Marc in London.<\/span><\/p>\n

In June 2012, Ribot was about to take the Vanguard stage for the first time as a headliner \u2013 backed by Chad Taylor<\/strong> on drums and Henry Grimes<\/strong> on bass and violin \u2013 when one of the Gordons took him aside and said, \u201cWhy do you have to play that shit? Play some blues.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The blues (\u201cA chair,\u201d said John Lennon, \u201cnot a design for a chair or a better chair.\u201d) is the essence of Ribot\u2019s work in the same way that celery is a key foundation in traditional gumbo. But you don\u2019t always taste the celery.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ribot is a musician un-beholden to a genre much less a set list. A student of Haitian folk music, he visits the Caribbean nation about once a year and wrote the score for a 1929 silent fantasy film by Yakov Protazanov<\/strong> called Aelita<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Given such vast reservoirs of material, they didn\u2019t quite know what his trio would play at the Vanguard.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t sure if we were going to do standards and we didn\u2019t,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we didn\u2019t play blues. But when I came off the stage Debbie said, \u2018What you just played is <\/em>the blues.\u2019 I guess it was the intensity of it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The observation reminded me of a flamenco guitarist I met in Spain last month in Granada as he played for euros in a park near the old Jewish quarter. His name was Salomon and I asked if he could play blues, stamping out the iconic and primitive opening to Bo Diddley\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m A Man.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He said yes but only if he could sing me a flamenco first. And it was the blues, as was the flamenco he played next, building it upon a 12-bar Delta chassis.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t fake the blues,\u201d said Ribot, who on St. Patrick\u2019s Day played Sunny\u2019s Bar, the dive in Red Hook, Brooklyn recently made famous in the memoir Sunny\u2019s Nights<\/em>, by Tim Sultan. \u201cYou can fake a lot of things by doing them as the blues, but it\u2019s not the same thing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It is often the case of the frustrating divining rod of authenticity going by the name, \u201cI\u2019ll know it when I see it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And though Ribot is not an ardent Johnny Winter<\/strong> fan (he was somewhat taken aback when I asked him, as I do all musicians, for an opinion of Johnny\u2019s music), he does recognize the late Texas guitarist as the real thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI remember him as a very soulful blues player,\u201d said Ribot, who recalled seeing Winter, who died in Zurich in 2015, at least once in concert. \u201cWhat more can you ask for than dying on tour?\u201d \"The<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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