The avant-garde guitar wizard Marc Ribot has been a staple of the downtown New York scene for decades. Ribot has been one of Tom Waits’ main collaborators since 1985’s Rain Dogs, and one of Waits’ most recent appearances was on Ribot’s 2018 version of the Italian revolutionary folk song “Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful).” Ribot has also famously backed up artists like Elvis Costello and John Zorn, among way too many others to list. Ribot has done plenty of big-time session work, and he’s also made tons of his own skronky, exploratory records. For a little while in 2000, I worked at the Knitting Factory, a place where Ribot was a regular. I once sold David Byrne a ticket to a Marc Ribot show, and that was a big moment for me. What I’m saying is: Ribot has been around for a long time, and he’s just now starting to sing.
Today, Marc Ribot announces his new LP Map Of A Blue City. Ribot is now 70 years old, and this is the first time he’s made a record that’s built around his singing voice. Ribot recorded Map Of A Blue City with producer Ben Greenberg, and it was built on the basis of home recordings and demos that Ribot recorded with the late Hal Willner. He wrote some of the album tracks back in the ’80s, and others are reinterpretations of things like Allen Ginsberg’s 1949 poem “Sometime Jailhouse Blues.”
