Marc Ribot doesn’t follow the rules. He bends them. His single, solo acoustic set, played on his wear-worn,1937 Gibson with its iconic sunburst top, had the feel of a coiled spring being released. Fluid, fluent and unpredictable with surprises at each turn, the dynamic shared something of the spirit and, at times, the language of Derek Bailey’s guitar playing.
Ribot slipped from exquisite renderings of standards to radical deconstructions of others, kicking off with a version of I’m in the Mood for Love with the body of his guitar being tapped and scraped. He offered homage to his original guitar teacher, the Haitian composer and guitarist, Franz Casseus and with equal respect, interpretations of modernist milestones, John Coltrane’s Amen and Albert Ayler’s Ghosts (‘a kind of, sort of Ghosts’, he quipped), where the figures were twisted and turned as he shaped the angular, improvisational flow.

A fragment of chunky blues was complemented later by a gentle, slow blues, delicately expanded while retaining its melodic root. There was also a brief extemporisation on a guitar rag and he revisited his album, Songs Of Resistance, to sing We are Soldiers in the Army with its sobering lyrics, ‘We have to fight although we have to cry’ in its chorus.
Ribot’s semi-sung recitation of Richard Siken’s extraordinary poem Several Tremendous (link below) for which he created a pared-down musical setting, was a riveting high-point on which he ended the set. Ribot said that these were words that he wished he could have said he’d written. To pick out those carrying the title: ‘… music and terrible, a small big music and several terrible thousand tremendous; …’ gives a sense of its flavour.
The poem is from a forthcoming collection written by Siken following a severe stroke and Siken, in an interview, declares, ‘It’s terrifying to read—especially out loud, because I sound crazy. It’s all noise and pattern. It’s the closest poem to pure lyric and the furthest from understanding …’ Which is what makes it so special. There’s no hiding from its spine-chilling combinations of imagery. It’s a car-crash where a stream of consciousness crashes in to a stream of unconsciousness, and Ribot’s latest quartet, Hurry Red Telephone, takes its name from the words of the poem.
This was followed by Ribot’s encore where he ruefully commented on the acute state of politics in America and returned to an Italian song of resistance, Bella Ciao (Farewell, Beauty), originally recorded by Ribot with Tom Waits on vocals, recounting the fascists knocking on the door ‘one fine morning’, a fitting and heartfelt finale to the evening.