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Marc Ribot and Ceramic Dog
“Not a ‘project’: a real band” promises this experimental power trio consisting of Marc Ribot (guitar), Shazad Ismaily (bass, electronics), and Ches Smith (drums). And their fairly recent Your Turn proves it with a lubricious hard-rock frenzy miles beyond their clinkety-clank 2011 debut. It’s also half-instrumental, which is all for the best—sidemen should always get […]
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‘Zorn @ 60: Masada Marathon’
The day after Yom Kippur, downtown visionary composer John Zorn hosts an extended evening of his Book of Angels series, perhaps the crown jewel of Masada, his spiritually irreverent and irreverently spiritual sect of avant-Judaism. For three and a half hours, a school of collaborators, from Secret Chiefs 3 to idiosyncratic guitarist Marc Ribot, join […]
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GUITAR HEROES
If your favorite slipstream guitarist reveals your personality, then the two shows Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, and Nels Cline perform tonight with multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily should offer an improvised musical Rorschach test with a high degree of accuracy. Frisell blends rural folk tropes with tightwire digital manipulations; master effects manipulator Cline helped transform Wilco from […]
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Medeski, Martin, & Wood
Pliability has been their cornerstone since forever, and restlessness helps drive all their aesthetic shifts. So connecting with a series of guests for a night each during this West Village stint is par for the course, if that term can be applied to this mercurial trio. From Senegalese drummers to fusion saxophonists, much turf will […]
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The Best Jazz Shows in New York City This Week 10/22/2012
The leaves are falling, but jazz music will be sticking around a while longer. Here’s a list of shows happening in the city we think you’ll enjoy. Vijay Iyer Trio The pianist Vijay Iyer helms one of the best rhythm sections in jazz today. A smart bandleader with a good sense of the piano trio […]
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Ceramic Dog
Named after a French expression for the moment of snarling restraint before two dogs attack each other, Marc Ribot’s post-hyphenate power trio sounds like the carnage that ensues next. With a style that might be described as Jersey-Dada, the mercurial guitarist built a reputation walking a tightrope of post-modern, genre-bending punk, Latin, and free jazz […]
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Dissonant Notes at Jazz Festivals
For decades, the term “New York jazz festival” was defined by George Wein. His Festival Productions began its storied Manhattan run in 1972, and quickly established an important sponsorship model with companies like JVC. Wein sold his company in 2007. Two years later, his flagship New York event was gone. It returned last year with […]
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In Praise of Bill Frisell, Nels Cline, and the Graceful Despair of Marc Ribot
Along with bagels, the Times, and Christiane Amanpour, Sunday morning around my bunkhouse means a Gene Autry movie. As a kid glued to the screen in the late ’50s and early ’60s, I never cottoned to his ’40s box-office rival, Roy Rogers; looking back, I think I preferred Autry simply because he was the better […]
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The Jazz Passengers
Cue wobbly gamelan: plink, plink, clink, clink. Cue aged whisper: “When people work together for a while, they do grow to care about each other…” After a decade, the boys are back together on Reunited and, though the skewed solos might make Peaches & Herb wince, the sextet is on target throughout the disc, from […]
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Chad Taylor’s Circle Down
Whether he’s rockin’ some rip-snort excursions with Marc Ribot or getting textural with Rob Mazurek, the drummer’s got his ear deeply tuned into the personality of the music at hand. His recent Circle Down places him in a freewheeling piano trio whose lyrical bent is balanced by some engaging abstractions. This trio’s ideas spill forward, […]