Marc Ribot
Don't Blame Me

THE REVIEW

There is no musician in the contemporary music scene capable of fully immersing himself in the magnificent ambiguity of the guitar like Marc Ribot. Because Ribot is essentially uncategorizable: loved by folk/rock singer-songwriters (ask Waits or Capossela for clarification), a brilliant interpreter of the Aylerian free-jazz movement, sly and melancholic in Cuban music, raw and aggressive in his noise-punk forays. And so, in this his second solo album, we can find in embryonic form a bit of all his souls.

The album was released in 1995 by DIW, a Japanese label specializing in avant-garde jazz, and it presents a sort of compendium of Ribot's musical influences, which most of the time take their cue from his jazz songbook. Most of the tracks are indeed standards (Ribot will confess in an interview that he wanted to select only tracks played by Monk or Albert Ayler), but as with every great musician, the standard can only be a pretext: in fact, starting from very well-known tracks like Body and Soul or I'm in the Mood for Love, he often and willingly extends into territories where the chordal structure or form is nothing but a fragile specter in the background, a container within which the only anchor for performer and listener is the melodic line of the theme, with respect to which every deviation is allowed. It's not uncommon to encounter tracks where the harmonic support is almost nonexistent, which allows Ribot to embark on monodic lines of extreme clarity and originality. There are three original tracks, very different in character from the rest of the album and which, in sequential listening, are true oases within which Ribot's more noise and experimental side emerges (notably Spigot, kaleidoscopic in the first half and almost pointillist in the second).

The echoes of his previous collaborations are often recognizable: in many parts, there is a playful and often ironic vision of jazz that was already a distinctive feature of the Lounge Lizards, or the continuous alternation between serious and playful, a result of the long and fruitful collaboration with the aforementioned Tom Waits. Therefore, it is an album that, like its interpreter, has the intrinsic advantage and disadvantage of being difficult to categorize, especially when contextualized in the era of its release, when Ribot's solo discography did not yet present many jazz-oriented works. I'll let you decide whether that's an advantage or a disadvantage. I already have an idea.