Hope

Album review

A jack of all trades, a transformer, a chameleon, larger-than-life, and utterly avant-garde: Marc Ribot is the most mercurial musician of his generation. At 67, the New Yorker is still a charming student of the guitar, and an expert in XXL riffs. From his beginnings supporting soul legends like Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke, followed by a brief stint in John Lurie's Lounge Lizards in the post-punk/no wave New York of the early eighties, he went on to be a regular sight alongside Tom Waits, John Zorn, Marianne Faithfull and the late Bashung. This punk among jazz guitarists also goes after Cuban music with his Cubanos Postizos, rattles jazz and rock with the Rootless Cosmopolitans and even appropriates classical Haitian music in a sublime tribute to the composer Frantz Casseus! His CV, already as thick as a Bible, now features yet another outfit: Ceramic Dog. A power trio launched around 2008, with bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Ches Smith, they deal in music that's pure and hard. It is a return to the roots for this wandering craftsman who defines Ceramic Dog as a "free/punk/funk/experimental/psychedelic/post electronica collective".

Constrained by the pandemic, the three friends managed to lock themselves in the studio in May 2020 to record Hope. This collection of eight original pieces reflects of the uncertainties of the time, and includes a spoken-word version of Wear Your Love Like Heaven by Donovan. The result is often an enigmatic portrait of Ribot: we find his no wave roots on They Met in the Middle (with alto sax by guest Darius Jones); his love for cavernous Blues (B-Flat Ontology) or voodoo groove (Nickelodeon), and his political commitments, on The Activist ("I wrote that after sitting at the millionth political meeting that didn't get anything done. So, in this song, I was channelling people who really enjoyed mouthing a bunch of radical sounding shit, as opposed to actually doing what urgently needed to be done"). This might all seem like a higgledy-piggledy random assortment, but Ribot's cerebral meanderings are always a great pleasure to get lost in. The times might be out of joint, but so is Marc Ribot. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz