Marc Ribot's interview in Fretboard Journal?

[red]

Does anyone have a link or a scanned copy of Marc Ribot's interview in the Fretboard Journal summer 2009 issue (http://www.fretboardjournal.com/back_issues/issues/issue14.html)?

It's supposedly very good, but I'd have to fork over quite a bit of money to pay for the whole magazine + shipping to the other side of the world, and I'm only interested in that interview...

Thanks!

[R_of_G]

Does anyone have a link or a scanned copy of Marc Ribot's interview in the Fretboard Journal summer 2009 issue (http://www.fretboardjournal.com/current_issue/)?

It's supposedly very good, but I'd have to fork over quite a bit of money to pay for the whole magazine + shipping to the other side of the world, and I'm only interested in that interview...

Thanks!

it's quite a good interview. i don't have a working scanner at the moment but i may have access to a friend's sometime soon. if so, i will see if i can get it scanned for you.

[red]

it's quite a good interview. i don't have a working scanner at the moment but i may have access to a friend's sometime soon. if so, i will see if i can get it scanned for you.
Very kind of you, your help is greatly appreciated!
I've sent you a private message with my email address.
Thanks!

[mantxi]

hello, I,m in the same case, also very interested and very far...

[tweng]

wow, i also really want to read this article !
i would love to see a scan of it !
is this possible ?
Thanks already !

[red]

Don't want to sound ungrateful, but since it's been about a month since R_of_G's kind offer and apparently still no scanner access, please assume that the request is still valid and unfulfilled.

OK, I'l stop asking now :D.

Thanks! :beer:

[red]

Found this (http://www.socialpurgatory.com/blog/?p=145) in the meantime. Pretty pictures...

[red]

OK, I've zoomed in the pictures of the magazine from the photographer's website (link posted in my previous post) and I transcribed the interview as best I could. I couldn't make out some, or part of the, words, and there are probably some typos in there as well, but hey. It's a draft until Fretboard Journal puts it up on their website. Here goes:


The Art of the Translator


Marc Ribot's interpretative powers
by John Kruth
photographs by Blake Sinclair


THERE'S A PLETHORA of guitarists in the world today, yet very few have forged a voice as uniquely original and immediately identifiable as that of Marc Ribot. Having stretched the vocabulary of the instrument in a myriad of ways, Ribot is one the most in-demand session players of his day; he's interpreted and illuminated songs by Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and Marianne Faithfull, improvised with jazz masters like McCoy Tyner, collaborated with cutting-edge composer and saxophonist John Zorn, and even worked with the late, great beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
Ribot's own projects include Spiritual Unity, an exploration into the repertoire of legendary free-jazz saxophonist Alber Ayler (featuring Ayler's bassist Henry Grimes), as well the genre-bending Ceramic Dog. In the past, Ribot's Cubanos Postizos and Rootless Cosmopolitans have both inspired and confounded listeners by combining jagged sonic fragments of free jazz, punk and tango to create a bold new musical mosaic. His post-punk deconstructions of '60s classics include singular interpretations of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary" and the Doors' anthem of spiritual revolution, "Break on Through."
I caught up with the guitarist at his Brooklyn apartment on a chilly December morning. He answered the door sleepy and disheveled. He brewed a pot of powefully strong coffee - to clear his head of the reverberations of last night's gig - and sat down in the kitchen to talk. As usual he'd been burning the candle, not at both ends, but with a blowtorch, in the middle.
Years ago, in the liner notes to 1990's Rootless Cosmopolitans, guitarist/producer Arto Lindsay wrote that "the remarkable thing about Marc Ribot is his inability to do one thing." Ribot's superhuman ??ule of recording dates and gigs (juggling three ?? his own with dates with McCoy Tyner and ?? ??ing tour of Japan) is clear proof of this fact.


The Arsenal

After a sip of Ribot's rocket fuel, we begin to ?? extremely diverse guitar collection.
"These are Wandre's guitars from Italy," ??. "They're amazing." Ribot reaches for his red ?? Cobra from among the many instruments hanging from a row of hooks on his bedroom wall. "Wandre himself came, not from guitar making, but eeither from building surfboards or customizing hot cars."
(Perhaps a little history is needed here. ?? "Wandre" Pioli was given his nickname by his ?? famous luthier. It's a very fitting nickname, ?? meaning "to go in reverse", as Wandre was ?? since childhood. Although compelling, the ?? Pioli's background as a designer of custom motorcycles and surfboards is untrue. He learned his craft directly from his father, not far from ??, "the cradle of luthierie" and birthplace of the ??.
"They have solid aluminum necks," Ribot explains. "The [volume and tone] knobs all go in different directions. There must be some advantage to it. Everything is original about it. Everything about Wandre's guitars came from out of his brain and not the way anybody else did it. It's got a totally original tremolo bar - a very good one, by the way. Probably the best ?? models in the States are owned by Buddy Miles(?). They have three pickups with a little drawer built ?? that you can keep your roaches or picks in, which is important in an electric guitar," he says with a grin.
We then move on to his cherry-red, late-'60s Guild Starfire. "I'm a big fan of aluminum," Ribot says, referring to the bridge. "The Bigsby [twang bar] on this one is original. I've used it on some of the recordings I've done with John Zorn, where he's going for a surf sound. The Starfire is a great, but very underrated guitar. They haven't taken off yet with collectors, so pricewise they're still pretty affordable."
Ribot then points to a funky, solid-body electric adorned with a faux tortoiseshell pickguard. "This Kay," he says, "looks something like a shop project. It's a really raw guitar. T Bone [Burnett] has one, but I haven't been able to get this one to match the rudeness of his."
Next, Ribot reaches for a fretless gourd-back banjo, which he picked up at Retrofret, a loft guitar shop in Brooklyn, where he's acquired a number of instruments. You'll find the banjo listed among Ribot's credits on Tom Waits' albums. "I didn't play this one on the album [Real Gone]," Ribot points out. "I picked up this instrument after I borrowed Tom's and was inspired. He has a cigar-box fretless.
"I don't know who built this thing," he says, flipping the banjo end over end. "This should be a lesson to all you banjo makers out there: Put your goddamn name on your instrument!"
He begins to pick the nylon strings in a clunky, stumbling Appalachian rythm that sounds like someone's hilbilly grandpa doing a drunken two-step. "I use an open tuning. I have no idea /what/ it is! I just keep playing with it. I tune all the strings to one or two notes.
"I'm a fake banjo player," Ribot admits. "I wouldn't call myself a banjo player. I use it on recordings. If you put enough reverb on it, it sounds like the poor man's pizzicato string section. My crowning achievement as a banjo player was playing with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on Country Music Television: we did a version of 'Black Dog' by Led Zeppelin. I had a lot of fun that day! Alison is such a gifted storyteller. There were points when we were recording [the Grammy winning 2007 album Raising Sand] that I forgot that I was playing guitar and just listened to her sing." Ribot's distinctive sonic stamp is all over the album, from his slinky banjo on Sam Phillips' sultry "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us", to his thunderous grunge on ?? Van Zandt's "Nothin'."
At this point, Ribot reaches for his ?? sunburst acoustic Gibson HG-00 ?? and fingerpicks a highly original rendition of ?? Gary Davis' "Death Don't Have No Mercy." ?? view suddenly grinds to a halt; there's nothing ?? listen. Even when interpreting a classic gospel tune, Ribot approaches the tune in a startling way. The chord voicings he employs break ?? into the time-worn melody, while his licks jump with an elastic snap.
Eventually, Ribot walks over to his closet to reveal a mother lode of cases. "There's more downstairs, but do me a favour," he laughs. "Don't give out my address!"
"I use everything, from a vintage '57 Telecaster with a maple neck, to a cheap, piece-of-crap guitar called an Audition, that I played on my solo album Don't Blame Me, one of the better things I did about 10 to 12 years back on the DIW label. I used that guitar a lot in overdub situations."
Has he found any particularly special relationship between certain guitars and amps to create his desired sound?
"[The late guitarist] Robert Quine once told me that 12-inch speakers are good for recording, and I found that it's true, so I use a [Fender] Deluxe," Ribot explains. "Mine isn't vintage, but I made sure I have alnico speakers - an alloy made of aluminum, nickel and cobalt. With the Cold War, those materials became more scarce, so they switched to different alloys. If you want to sound like a guitarist from the '40s or '50s, find an alnico II speaker; if you want to sound like Jerry Garcia, use the latter alloy.
"I'm a big fan of amp reverbs and vibratos. My tech rider calls for working reverb and vibrato, but you'd be surprised how often they don't listen. I don't much pay attention to brand names on pedals and stuff like that. I recently got a Melody Maker that I really like from the early '60s. I like Gibsons that are closer to Fenders. There's a lot of guitarists that make good use of Les Pauls, but for me, I'm so self-conscious about playing one. I mean, millions of guitarists have used that sound.
"To me, the greatest use of a Les Paul I ever heard came from Barthelemy Attisso, the guitarist from a band called Orchestra Baobab, perhaps the greatest underrated guitarist in the world. Check him out - the guy's a genius! He's really doing something."
With so many guitars piled up in the closed, how does Ribot decide what to put in his toolbox?
"Unfortunately I can't bring them all", he ??. "I would if I could. When I was more dedicated, I would try and bring more. But usually, I listen to what the person's after. Marianne's album was ?? very unique; it had a sound. And T Bone Burnett's The True Fake Identity, which features three drummers working in the same room, worked great. These are projects that have an original sound because they're cut in real studios with a large number of musicians and a budget. It's a dying art, because the budgets don't permit it - things are set up at small home studios, like mine, where you can ?? of people, but one at a time. Does that hurt? It's unfortunate."
The guitar tour continues.
"This is a '47 Gibson archtop, which I ?? I mostly use standard tuning, but when I play I like to tune down about a third." Ribot then pulls the humidifier from the guitar's f-hole and stroll over to the kitchen sink to dampen the sponge.
"I gotta get this baby a drink!"

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The Approach

For Marc Ribot, playing the guitar is a very physical experience. He plucks notes with surprising force and power. Watching the man solo, he virtually squeezes the notes out of the instrument. At times, he'll bang the body with the heel of his hand, or wrench the neck and yank the twang bar in order to produce his unique lexicon of ferocious screechers, quirky squeeks and shimmering sighs - although his aggressive approach does make him a regular at the local guitar repair shop.
"I've been re-thinking how I play lately," he chuckles. "I go through frets pretty fast."
Ribot took classical-guitar lessons for years, even as he continued to play electric guitar in rock bands. "Since I was 25," he explains, "I've mostly played with a pick for everything," he explains. "I do a combination of things, like holding the pick in between my index and middle fingers to leave my ring finger free to play intervals, so I can jump strings quickly that would otherwise be difficult."
Listening to Ribot's music, it's apparent that adventurous saxophonists like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy have influenced and informed his style - as much as, if not more than, any guitarists. Dolphy's zig-zagging bass clarinet would leap octaves in a single breath. The fractured metric replacement of Thelonious Monk's piano chords can also be heard in the guitarist's unique phrasing.
"A lot of sax players have been behind most of the major breakthroughs in jazz," Ribot points out, "with the exception of bebop, where Charlie Christian had a lot to do with formulating it. Certainly, with free jazz, and with Monk's style, people other than guitarists often made the important changes and the best expressions in the music.That's one part of it. The other thing is, I'm interested in the art of the translator, understanding that direct translation is, as in language, not possible, not really desirable."
Like Dolphy, Ribot is both a sideman and a bandleader. Many of Dolphy's most expressive solos were played with Coltrane or free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, or the great bassist and composer Charles Mingus.
Up until recently, Ribot says, "I feel that I've done better work as a side musician than a leader. I like the idea of interpretation or actively reading someone else's idea, which usually leads to altering it."
Each artist and session offers Ribot a different approach. He's got to listen with open ears and fresh instincts; he doesn't just reach into his sonic paint box, scrawl his name to an artist's work with one of his signature riffs and collects his check. Do the lyrics of first-class songwriters like Waits, Costello, and Jolie Holland ultimately determine Ribot's approach, or is it the chord progression, rythmic feel, vocal tone or phrasing that inspires him as a soloist?
"It's important to listen to the lyrics and get the overall meaning of the tune, as well as the production," he says. "Is the production creating a tie to, say, the 1940s or the 1970s? If it sounds like it's coming out of the 1930s, that doesn't necessarily mean I've gotta go get my 1930s guitar and play that way. I could either go with it, or I could juxtapose it with something that could never have occured then. It depends on a lot of factors.
"Waits gives me a lot o freedom to come up with whatever I want. He's a great editor. He'll record the first thing I come up, get it down, and then say if he's cool with the idea or whether he wants me to keep looking. He often encourages me to explore further, which, in my opinion, is what a producer should do."
Ribot's fractured, jagged guitar solos have been an integral component to Tom Waits' increasingly experimental sounds since 1985's Rain Dogs. As Ribot points out, "The seeds for that sound were already present on Swordfishtrombones, the record before I played with him. I just went further in the direction that he'd already established.
"Waits thinks /dramatically/, in the sense that he is creating music for theater. He uses every element - lyrics, sonics, and production values - to create a drama. He talks about the guitar as a character in a play. Does this character belong in this scene? As for sonics, in this context, if there's a discordant sound, maybe it relates to whether or not the character who is singing it is disturbed."
In an interview, Waits once said he was happiest with his voice when he heard it back in the headphones and it scared the hell out of him. For Ribot, playing and interacting with an instrument like Waits' voice, which ranges from hoarse apologies to thunderous, feral howls, can be a challenge. Does he try to match him grunge for grunge?
"I never thought about that directy before," he muses. "But when you're playing with someone who has a really strong voice, you enter into a dialog with them where the guitar is the voice by other means, or the voice reflected. You can hear that with Hubert Sumlin, who is one of my favourite guitarists. I guess it's a good comparison, how Hubert's guitar worked with Howlin' Wolf... Hubert needs a counter voice that's as strong as Wolf's, and that's hard to come by!"
Ribot has a way of finding powerful singers to accompany (or they have had a way of finding him) - from Marianne Faithfull and her nicotine wisp and razor-sharp phrasing to Jolie Holland and her behind-the-beat, hole-in-her-soul blues. He was already famous for his cubist guitar licks on songs like Costello's "Let Him Dangle" (from 1989's Spike) or the strangulated solo on Waits' "Clap Hands" (from Rain Dogs). ("Back in that time," he notes, "I was doing most of my work on a cheap ESP fake Telecaster.") Yet, he continues to expand his sonic vocabulary on his recent work with Holland and Faithfull, employing and ever increasing array of tonalities.
"I approach it the same way no matter who I'm playing with," Ribot responds. "I try and make the song make sense, a sense that makes sense to me that I like. If that means playing soft major chords, then that's what it means. If it means playing total noise, then that's what it means. If I have a style that's consistent, I find that regrettable. It's only because of the result of my limitations. I don't believe in trotting out the few tropes you have anytime the microphone is on, and that becomes your brand in the capitalist marketplace. A musician should focus on the meaning of the song."

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The Voice

Ribot next unzips a soft-shell case to reveal an old, funky, solid-body with a gold-brown finish. "On the Spiritual Unity [album], I believe I used the same guitar for the whole thing: an early '50s Harmony Stratotone. You can find them, they're around. It's very light, which is one of it's many charms for the travelling musician. It's slightly short-scale, which helps it fit in the overhead. It's gone one very interesting, strong pickup - very strong in the bass response - and the neck is one piece [through the body], which gives it more sustain."
Re-interpreting the squalling gospel jazz of Alber Ayler with a post-punk sensibility, as he did with Spiritual Unity, may be daring, but sharing the stage with master pianist McCoy Tyner - the man who drove the classic Coltrane quartet to the peak of its spiritual expression - has got to be another ballgame altogether.
"Playing with McCoy is a real stretch," Ribot says. "I'm trying my best to keep up with his thing. It's important to know the difference between the gesture and the act. On a record, I can create, by playing a couple of octaves with a certain tone, the gestures and ambiance of Wes Montgomery, but that's not the same thing as taking a Wes Montgomery solo. In some situations, it can take more intelligence to know when the actual thing is not called for and the gesture is better.
"In Tom's records, what's needed is the reference and the gesture, but to go and take a really involved bebop solo over his material would be beside the point and a waste of notes. With McCoy Tyner, it's not about gestures. When a musician of McCoy Tyner's stature calls, you go, whether your think you are ready or not.
"There were no rehearsals," Ribot laughs. "None!"
Tyner, a main component of Coltrane's early-60s quartet, played piano during the brief interim when multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy joined the band, further stretching the music's boundaries with the addition of his alto sax, bass clarinet and flute. Did Tyner make any connection between Ribot's approach to the guitar and Dolphy's dizzying virtuosity? Ribot takes the comparison as a compliment; he, at one point, even transcribed Dolphy's entire solo from "Out to Lunch".
"Doing that gig has put me face to face with my technical limitations," Ribot admits, although ?? that Tyner has been "very open and supportive" of his ideas. "He's doing a lot of uptempo things. He plays hard, with such energy. They need that piano retuned after each set. He's an amazing virtuoso."
Ribot chose to bring his 1960 Gibson ES-135 on Tyner's recent West Coast tour, the same guitar he used on the Cubanos Postizos album. At this point, he goes to open another case and busts out a jagged bebop ?? with harmonics.
"I don't delude myself. I don't think McCoy Tyner was sitting around listening to his old Lounge Lizards records saying, 'Oh man, I gotta have Marc Ribot play on my album.' I think the idea probably originated with his record company. That said, McCoy was very open to the collaborations with me and [Bill] Frisell, and the other guitarists [on Tyner's 2008 Guitars CD]. When I suggested something in the studio, like doing some free pieces, he rode with it right away. In addition to being a brilliant pianist, he's a generous-spirited human being."
Pianists are commonly faced with the difficulty of creating an immediately identifiable voice in the instrument, and it is no different for guitarists.
"With pianists, it's often thought that what distinguishes them from their peers is that the sound comes from their hands," Ribot explains. "When you listen to guitarists, most of them are playing licks and riffs, but what I listen for is the thought involved. Is the guitarist just stitching a bunch of predetermined licks together? Because if that's the case, that's just an avoidance of thought. Sometimes I'm on automatic pilot too, but that's not what I go for."
Being in the moment and being intuitive is equally as important as a guitarist's chops. It's really difficult to maintain the same level of spontaneity in the studio as one brings to a live performance, but, as Ribot points out, that's not always the goal.
"It depends on what's being recorded," he says. "In general, the studio makes you self-conscious because you immediately hear back what you just played. Such playing is really about one thing: unbelievable attention to rythmic detail. That's why the great studio players are so relaxed and meticulous. The same kind of ??ment that can serve well in a live setting is sometimes not so great in the studio. People get all into it, and then they listen back, and it doesn't groove, it doesn't rock.
"Records are not just little aesthetic objects, but they can also be like artifacts. For instance, when you listen to a live Albert Ayler record, what are you getting? Often times, the recording quality is crap, but what you get is a piece of the true cross. You get an artifact of an event that took place. It's religious music, in a sense, because you believe in the value of it. Like the Pentecostal preacher shouting and speaking in tongues; it's not that it sounds so beautiful when he's doing it, it's that you believe he's having an experience. It's the evidence of a state of mind. It's about process; it's creating the evidence of an experience."
Sometimes an unusual approach in the studio may yield unexpected results.
"I was doing some tracks for T Bone Burnett," Ribot chuckles, "for a project that had heavy-metal guitar, rabid rock playing, and I was in there with the speakers cranked - going 'yeah, rock!' and having my Zeppelin fantasy - when he said, 'Try doing it this way...' and turned the overall studio levels down and turned my guitar down to the point where all I could hear was my electric guitar acoustically. I was in the control room, and the amp was out there blazing away, but I couldn't hear it. What was cool about it was that you don't get all excited, so you sit in the groove better.
"It shows what a good producer T Bone is. If you want to create excitement in the listener, then it's got to rock, which often involves not having control in the player, having abandon.
"Control in the player," Ribot laughs at the thought. "What a paradox! What bitter irony!"

[mantxi]

thank you very much, red. you have worked a lot!!!a good interview for all ribot´s fans