Marc Ribot: Map of a Blue City
Marc Ribot was never suited to play straight jazz. A New Jersey kid trying to make a stand in New York, Ribot realized that in his 20s while trying to bop with veteran organist Jack McDuff. But Ribot soon found his calling—and the core of his mission, really—both in the city’s melting pot and in its no-holds-barred No Wave scene. He threw out the rules he was trying to ace, joined the Lounge Lizards, and accepted Tom Waits’ invitation to play on Rain Dogs. Ribot stopped trying to sound like the guitarist he was supposed to be and became, instead, the guitar player he was. In the last 40 years, he has been an indispensable collaborator to the likes of Waits, Robert Plant, John Zorn, and so many others that his list of credits reads like a library’s card catalog. But Ribot has also been a great bandleader, from his renegade bunch Ceramic Dog to his committed Latin band, Los Cubanos Postizos. Since that mid-‘80s epiphany, Ribot has continued to be anything he’s wanted to be.
To wit, since the mid-‘90s, Ribot has taken occasional private stabs at becoming something of a songwriter—that is, the classic sort who sings as he accompanies himself on guitar. His early apartment demos were rejected by Epitaph Records for their apparent darkness, but his longtime friend and booster, the late producer and connector Hal Willner, heard something in those songs and did what Willner often did by building grand versions with strings and stacked textures. Ribot actually favored his demos but shelved both versions until after the pandemic, slowly stitching the two together in a wonderful hybrid with the help of Uniform’s Ben Greenberg. The result, Map of a Blue City, is a gorgeous and troubled record fit for these times, Ribot’s reflections on the pains of history and the crush of the present matched by a wrecking-ball rendition of The Carter Family’s “When the World’s on Fire.” It took Ribot 30 years to get here, to a solo singer-songwriter record of his own, but the wait is worth the wisdom it rendered.