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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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MARC RIBOT'S CERAMIC DOG
Purcell Rooms, South Bank Centre, London,
7th May 2006 |
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| Serge
and I have recently been having a little spat about
asparagus. You know, that lovely gloriously green
and highly seasonal vegetable that grows mostly
in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Norfolkshire,
which we eat by the plateful at this time of year,
lightly boiled and with lashings of salted butter.
Serge tells me they grow it in France too, but it’s
an anaemic slug-like colour, overcooked and eaten
with some fancy sauce from Holland (note from
the editor: more about that in my comments below!).
I’m about as clear as to how we’re going
to resolve this impasse as I am how to start this
review. Not only did Marc
Ribot and his band spend most of the
evening subverting the notion of the song (apparently
they’re now called ‘pieces’),
they also subverted the notion of concert (yes,
I know they started at 7.45 and finished about two
hours later, but that was almost as close to form
as it got), and in the process subverted the shape
of my review. But here goes … |
| Even
if you don’t know it you’ll be familiar
with Ribot. He’s the fantastic guitarist behind
many of Tom Wait’s best albums, particularly
those of recent years. You may, as a consequence,
have come across his wonderful album Y Los Cubanos
Postizos, a tribute to the Cuban guitarist Arsenio
Rodriguez. Now had you bought tickets for this gig
on the basis of this then you would have made a
big mistake. For Ribot’s day job is ace New
York free-jazz guitar maestro, a huge admirer of
Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler (this it had to
be said, confused me somewhat – an album as
a tribute to one of Britain’s great philosophers?
But there you go…), and a man at the vanguard
of pushing the guitar (and associated instruments)
as far as it can go. He’s uncomfortable with
the description ‘avant garde’ (he claims
he would play dance music all the time if he could),
but it certainly seemed like a fair way to describe
the evening (no dance music). |
Marc Ribot |
| And
he was certainly playing to a painfully highbrow
heavy duty muso audience, all carefully eyeing each
other up as they weighed their relative musical
expertise and knowledge in case there was a showdown
at the end of the night. The ones that stayed that
is. There was a steady trickle of folks heading
to the door during the first half hour or so, and
I’m still convinced that the guy who attempted
to climb onto the stage waving his arms was trying
to shut them up (the photographer thought he was
trying to conduct). |
 |
| The
band is Ceramic Dog, or as we would say in Glasgow,
Wally Dug. Ribot seems to think this is the “ultimate
kitsch object”, but I’d certainly be
careful saying that in Glasgow. It’s also
a “free/punk/funk/experimental/psychedelic/post
electronica collective” featuring Ribot on
guitar, Shazad Ismailly on bass,
and Chess Smith on drums and percussion.
“Sonically dense” was a description
I read somewhere. No shit! Some of it is so dense
it’s like fighting your way through a jungle.
But it’s worth the struggle. The evening is
both exhausting and exhilarating. It begins in fairly
harmonious style, very repetitive melodies (played
I think, not tape loops) almost in a Bill Frisell
style, with delicate and carefully crafted percussion
from Smith and soft low bass from Ismailly. From
that we went to ‘Hatred and filth’ (yes,
this one was introduced and had a title), which,
according to my detailed notes, was ‘like
Ghost riders in the Sky on acid – all fractured
and frenetic’. I also noted the Black Sabbath
moment (the night was full of musical jokes of one
sort or another) and wondered if it wasn’t
all a little more conventional than we might imagine,
a thought that has stayed with me, despite the ‘avant
garde’ tag. From what I could gather we had
‘a piece’ about intellectuals (it sounded
as though that was what was being chanted), a bosanova
‘Todo el mundo es kitsch’ (with a witty
Rolling Stones joke), a spoken song ‘When
we were young and we were freaks’, another
heavy rocker ‘Erotic auto’, peppered
with snatches of ‘Born to be wild’ and
other motoring tunes, and a ‘protest piece’,
’99 and a half won’t do’, during
which Ribot expressed his considerable frustration
at both George Bush and that nice Tony Blair’s
role in the Iraq war. Ribot obviously takes these
sort of issues very seriously (have a look at this
interesting website)
but to be frank his political interventions in terms
of shouting, half-singing, and chanting didn’t
really get much beyond a schoolboy level of discourse
– best to let the guitar do the talking Marc. |
And
what a guitar – Ribot’s playing is inspired
– delicate, destructive, deconstructed and
deeply imaginative. Ismailly plays bass, keyboards,
percussion (various) and an empty water dispenser.
He’s intense, crouched over his instruments,
and yet periodically surprisingly humorous –
perhaps it’s the bottle of J&B that he
takes occasional pulls from as the night goes on.
He shares the J&B with drummer Smith, whose
painstaking attention to detail is totally absorbing
– even when he’s changing the batteries
in one of his gizmos – when he lets rip he’s
all elbows and flying hands. The band are as tight
as a knot, and they’re obviously having fun.
So after a return to the stage for two ‘pieces’
as encore (not really that subversive after all)
we left the hall reeling, hardly aware that we’d
been in there for two hours, so engrossing was the
music. But I did have to ask, ‘what’s
the big idea?’. For all the thought that had
obviously gone into the music, and the rather prosaic
chants and occasional lyrics, I’m dammed if
I could really see anything that was really cogent
leaping out at me. |
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| So
I was forced to conclude that they did it simply
because they could, which in truth was good enough
for me. - Nick Morgan (concert photographs by
Kate, asparagii by Nick and Serge) |
Check
the index of all reviews:
Nick's Concert Reviews
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