Wake the Dead Spring Music Series: Inasmuchas Life is Borrowed
Ensemble performed the soundtrack to the film. With video projection
April 14, 2001

Marc Ribot (pronounced REE-bow)
was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1954. As a teen, he played guitar in various garage bands while studying with his mentor, the Haitian classical guitarist and composer Frantz Casseus. In 1978, Ribot crossed the river to New York City, where he served as sideman for such musicians as jazz organist Jack McDuff and legendary soul shouter Wilson Pickett. The following year, Ribot joined up with the Realtones and the Uptown Horns Band, which worked as a NYC pickup band for such Stax/Volt stars as Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, Solomon Burke and many others. Ribot began his five year stint as a member of the Lounge Lizards John Lurie’s innovative and influential Downtown jazz ensemble in 1984.

His six-string stylings, which blended elements of classicist Blues guitar with an ironic No Wave/Knitting Factory aestethic, caught the ear of a number of artists who were also interested in amalgamating and disrupting disparate musical traditions. Ribot went on to perform on some of these singer/songwriter’s finest moments, including Elvis Costello’s “SPIKE,” “MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE,” and “KOJAK VARIETY”; Marianne Faithful’s “BLAZING AWAY”; and, most notably, Tom Waits’ “RAIN DOGS,” “BIG TIME,” “FRANK’S WILD YEARS,” and the new “MULE VARIATIONS.”

All the while, the increasingly in-demand guitarist continued to explore the ever-changing terrain of New York’s New Music, working with such musicians as Arto Lindsay, Don Byron, Elliot Sharp, Anthony Coleman, T-Bone Burnett, the Jazz Passengers, Evan Lurie, Chocolate Genius, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, and John Zorn in any number of incarnations. Ribot also composed and recorded his own brand of Downtown soul music with his bands, Rootless Cosmopolitans and Shrek, as well under his own name. His 1996 “DON’T BLAME ME,” which found a solo Ribot reinventing a number of American standards, was hailed by The Village Voice’s Gary Giddins as “a record filled with savory and unlikely amusements.”

In recent years, Ribot’s always-eclectic workload has included sessions with Cibo Matto, the late Allen Ginsburg, Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio’s Surrender To The Air project, Atlantic recording artist Madeleine Peyroux (found on her 1996 “DREAMLAND”), and Patty Scialfa on her forthcoming solo album. Ribot also continues to do a great deal of work with Zorn, having played on his “FILMWORKS” collections, and as a member of his Bar Kokhba ensemble.