Interview with Marc Ribot in In&Out Jazz

My interview with Marc Ribot is an edited transcript of the conversation I had with Marc Ribot on a special episode of Smells Like Jazz Radio (which you can find here).

In a career that spans almost four decades, Ribot has played on hundreds of records, both as a collaborator (with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithful, T-Bone Burnett, John Zorn, and many others) and as a solo artist and band leader. He has led punkrock and jazz bands, composed pieces for film and dance performances, and ventured into Jewish, Haitian and Cuban musical traditions.

Today, at 72, Ribot is as productive as ever. In the last few months he has been touring with three different projects: his free jazz quartet Hurry Red Telephone , his punkrock trio Ceramic Dog , and his solo album Map of a Blue City , which was released last year.

I caught up with Ribot while he was taking a short break from this busy touring schedule, back home in New York. We talked about his recent projects, but also about a host of other things, like the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the music of Albert Ayler and Henry Grimes, Hannah Arendt’s reflections on democracy, the politics of improvisation, songs of protest and resistance, musicians’ rights, and his earliest musical formation at age of 11 by Frantz Casseus, the father of Haitian classical guitar.

The interview is freely available at the In&Out Jazz website.