Marc Ribot’s SHREK

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.

In the mid-‘90s, Ribot led Shrek, a savage and splenetic mostly instrumental wrecking crew that combined No Wave irreverence with real technical sophistication. They battered and bent “The Wind Cries Mary” and took Albert Ayler’s “Bells” on a journey through video-game mazes. With two drummers, two guitarists, and the roving bass of Sebastian Steinberg, Shrek was bound to be short-lived, its relentless energy the sort that seemed fated to burn out before too terribly long. At Big Ears, though, Ribot and Steinberg reconvene the band with two wonderfully distinct drummers, Ches Smith and Chad Taylor, and the guitarist Mary Halvorson. It is one of four Ribot shows in Knoxville this year.