Que vivir el momento feliz
Today's formative-album replay: Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos. Can music be metaphorical? I’m not talking about program music or songs with lyrics, which by definition have clear authorial intentions and meanings, but about something closer to the marrow of music itself, to its sound, to what musicians do, and all that can mean by itself. Can a trombone be a giraffe, say, a cello a lover, a drum a machine?
In the case of guitarist Marc Ribot, metaphor not only seems like the only way to begin to describe what he does; it seems to be somehow the level he’s working on too. When playing a solo on an ostensible rock record, like Tom Waits’s “Clap Hands” or Elvis Costello’s “Chewing Gum,” what he does is a kind of architectural graffiti, a fractal splatter that cracks and even reshapes the song’s foundations in its image. On a solo record like Saints, he seems to be communing with spirits inside the body of his guitar, coaxing them out and wrestling them down for massage and vivisection in a kind of primitive but brightly lit operating theatre. (“St. James Infirmary” indeed.)
On his greatest record, Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos, a.k.a. The Prosthetic Cubans, the metaphorical register seems more straightforward: In stripping down the conjunto arrangements of classics by the pathbreaking Cuban bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez to a quintet, Ribot is making his Fender Jaguar stand in for horns, winds, strings, vocals, even percussion. Ribot has spoken about the way sax players like Coltrane, Dolphy, and Albert Ayler have influenced his playing, and how playing with Waits is a kind of acting assignment in which the instruments are like a cast of characters, so it's hardly news that his guitar can travel to unlikely places and take on roles it's not accustomed to.
But there’s something else going on in this deceptively slow-boiling record, which starts with a long, brooding mood piece by Alfredo Boloña, “Aurora en Pekin” (“Dawn in Peking”), starts to simmer with the Rodriguez son “Aqui Como Alla,” then takes sudden nimble flight with “Como Se Goza en el Barrio” and the inspired original “Postizo.” From that peak it grinds through the metronomic “No Me Llores Mas,” boogies down with the woozy, punchy “Los Teenagers Bailan Changui,” shuffles sidelong through the smoky “Fiesta en el Solar,” devolves to clenched spoken-word with “La Vida Es Un Sueno,” lingers over the title sentiment of “Esclavo Triste,” then shimmies offstage with the Sabu Martinez bop “Choserita Plena.” It's a perfect program, a concert in miniature, and through it all Ribot’s guitar—almost entirely playing, or rather singing, single-note lines—is the Tesla coil bringing it all to uncanny life.
The question is: Why does guitar, and Ribot's guitar in particular, seem to be able to dig down to the essence of this music? (Ribot has self-effacingly reported that most musicians from Cuba find his band’s take on these tunes, standards in their homeland, to be hilarious—though in fact his original Postizos band included Miami Sound Machine maestro Robert J. Rodriguez, an authentic rather than a prosthetic Cuban). I think the answer is subtle, even spiritual (and what is music but spirit given temporal form?): It is that Arsenio Rodriguez—a blind genius from the Matanzas province who created or synthesized most of the rhythmic and sonic tropes of mid-century Cuban son montuno—was a tres player. The tres, a distinctive Afro-Cuban guitar tuned in an open major key (typically three octave-spanning pairs of strings sounding G-G, C-C, E-E), is a sunny-sounding instrument as strong on rhythmic propulsion as melody. Yet the instrument doesn’t dominate Rodriguez’s seminal recordings of the 1940s and ’50s, and that’s because among his central innovations was to build songs up and out by having horns, percussion, vocals, and piano mimic the chordal ostinatos, or guajeos, of the tres. The counterpoint among these layers, as much as the music's distinctive clave rhythms—incredibly, Rodriguez is credited with the not insignificant idea of adding a conga to the conjunto—is what gives his songs their compositional richness.
You may see where I’m going with this: that Ribot could hear this music’s essential guitar underpinnings, even in songs where Rodriguez’s tres isn’t front and center. (In cases where it is, as in the blazing solo in the middle of this one, you can hear the link to Ribot clearly.) While Ribot handily proves his mettle as a composer in his own right (“Postizo” is arguably the album’s high point), the sympathetic wavelength he is able to tap with a long-dead master marks him as one of the most highly attuned interpretive performers I’ve had the pleasure to witness. What Ribot is doing is not “more than” music somehow, though it can certainly feel like that; like the work of all the greatest musicians, his playing reminds us just how much music can do and signify, which is to say quite a lot indeed.
For easy comparison, here's a playlist of the Cuban originals and the Ribot covers:
In the case of guitarist Marc Ribot, metaphor not only seems like the only way to begin to describe what he does; it seems to be somehow the level he’s working on too. When playing a solo on an ostensible rock record, like Tom Waits’s “Clap Hands” or Elvis Costello’s “Chewing Gum,” what he does is a kind of architectural graffiti, a fractal splatter that cracks and even reshapes the song’s foundations in its image. On a solo record like Saints, he seems to be communing with spirits inside the body of his guitar, coaxing them out and wrestling them down for massage and vivisection in a kind of primitive but brightly lit operating theatre. (“St. James Infirmary” indeed.)
On his greatest record, Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos, a.k.a. The Prosthetic Cubans, the metaphorical register seems more straightforward: In stripping down the conjunto arrangements of classics by the pathbreaking Cuban bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez to a quintet, Ribot is making his Fender Jaguar stand in for horns, winds, strings, vocals, even percussion. Ribot has spoken about the way sax players like Coltrane, Dolphy, and Albert Ayler have influenced his playing, and how playing with Waits is a kind of acting assignment in which the instruments are like a cast of characters, so it's hardly news that his guitar can travel to unlikely places and take on roles it's not accustomed to.
But there’s something else going on in this deceptively slow-boiling record, which starts with a long, brooding mood piece by Alfredo Boloña, “Aurora en Pekin” (“Dawn in Peking”), starts to simmer with the Rodriguez son “Aqui Como Alla,” then takes sudden nimble flight with “Como Se Goza en el Barrio” and the inspired original “Postizo.” From that peak it grinds through the metronomic “No Me Llores Mas,” boogies down with the woozy, punchy “Los Teenagers Bailan Changui,” shuffles sidelong through the smoky “Fiesta en el Solar,” devolves to clenched spoken-word with “La Vida Es Un Sueno,” lingers over the title sentiment of “Esclavo Triste,” then shimmies offstage with the Sabu Martinez bop “Choserita Plena.” It's a perfect program, a concert in miniature, and through it all Ribot’s guitar—almost entirely playing, or rather singing, single-note lines—is the Tesla coil bringing it all to uncanny life.
The question is: Why does guitar, and Ribot's guitar in particular, seem to be able to dig down to the essence of this music? (Ribot has self-effacingly reported that most musicians from Cuba find his band’s take on these tunes, standards in their homeland, to be hilarious—though in fact his original Postizos band included Miami Sound Machine maestro Robert J. Rodriguez, an authentic rather than a prosthetic Cuban). I think the answer is subtle, even spiritual (and what is music but spirit given temporal form?): It is that Arsenio Rodriguez—a blind genius from the Matanzas province who created or synthesized most of the rhythmic and sonic tropes of mid-century Cuban son montuno—was a tres player. The tres, a distinctive Afro-Cuban guitar tuned in an open major key (typically three octave-spanning pairs of strings sounding G-G, C-C, E-E), is a sunny-sounding instrument as strong on rhythmic propulsion as melody. Yet the instrument doesn’t dominate Rodriguez’s seminal recordings of the 1940s and ’50s, and that’s because among his central innovations was to build songs up and out by having horns, percussion, vocals, and piano mimic the chordal ostinatos, or guajeos, of the tres. The counterpoint among these layers, as much as the music's distinctive clave rhythms—incredibly, Rodriguez is credited with the not insignificant idea of adding a conga to the conjunto—is what gives his songs their compositional richness.
You may see where I’m going with this: that Ribot could hear this music’s essential guitar underpinnings, even in songs where Rodriguez’s tres isn’t front and center. (In cases where it is, as in the blazing solo in the middle of this one, you can hear the link to Ribot clearly.) While Ribot handily proves his mettle as a composer in his own right (“Postizo” is arguably the album’s high point), the sympathetic wavelength he is able to tap with a long-dead master marks him as one of the most highly attuned interpretive performers I’ve had the pleasure to witness. What Ribot is doing is not “more than” music somehow, though it can certainly feel like that; like the work of all the greatest musicians, his playing reminds us just how much music can do and signify, which is to say quite a lot indeed.
For easy comparison, here's a playlist of the Cuban originals and the Ribot covers:
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