Rife with invention and iconoclastic attitude, New York City’s 1970s Downtown scene was famous for tricksters, renegades and eccentrics who laced their music with pastiche and irony.
At first glance the uncategorizable guitarist Marc Ribot seemed to embody that seen-it-all aesthetic, but listening to his music quickly revealed a relentlessly curious artist utterly sincere about his manifold musical passions.
His expansive roster of credits and projects mean that many music fans are only familiar with particular aspects of his work, such as serving as an instrumental muse for Tom Waits on albums like “Rain Dogs,” “Franks Wild Years,” and “Mule Variations.” Others have discovered him through his work with saxophonist/composer John Zorn’s vivid Filmworks recordings and searing Masada projects. Whatever the context, Ribot is rarely mistaken for another guitarist.
On tour celebrating his 70th birthday, he performs Sept. 22 at the SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium with bassist Hilliard Greene, drummer Chad Taylor, and fellow guitar explorer Mary Halvorson, a renowned bandleader and composer herself who was awarded a coveted MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.
She and Ribot have worked together widely, touring with his volatile project built around John Coltrane’s late quartet album “Sun Ship” and with his Young Philadelphians band featuring Ornette Coleman’s pummeling Prime Time rhythm section tandem of bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma and drummer G. Calvin Weston.
“I transcribed string parts from 1970s Philly soul sessions and we’d use pick-up string sections on the road,” Ribot said about the eyebrow-raising hybrid. “Mary can navigate anything. She’s such a committed improviser.”
At the SFJAZZ show the band is joined by protean tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, a similarly wide-angle player who just came through the region with the Messthetics, a trio featuring two members of the storied Washington, D.C. punk band Fugazi. Ribot’s quartet (minus Lewis) also plays Kuumbwa in Santa Cruz Sept. 23.
“James has a gravitas to his playing that’s undeniable,” Ribot said. “Every note is there. A lot of people play fast and have absorbed John Coltrane’s language, but James has the sound.”
Lewis has been particularly impressed by Ribot’s “Songs of Resistance,” a 2018 album reimagining anthems from 20th-century political movements featuring vocalists like Tom Waits, Steve Earle, Meshell Ndegeocello, Justin Vivian Bond, Fay Victor, and Syd Straw.
“I’m so honored that he keeps calling me for gigs,” Lewis said. “This dude is a doer, not just a talker, really showing how you can do activism in music. He’s an elder statesman who’s been in the trenches.”
Ribot’s bone-deep musical commitment is often coupled with a self-mocking bent that surfaces in his band’s monikers. He explored his love of Cuban son montuno innovator Arsenio Rodríguez’s music in Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos (Marc Ribot and the Prosthetic Cubans). His debut album under his own name, 1990’s “Rootless Cosmopolitans,” appropriated an antisemitic epithet from Stalin’s demonology.
With both names he sought to “intentionally call into the question notions of authenticity,” he said. But the creative DNA of the group he’s touring with speaks to a different kind of authenticity.
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The quartet centers on the late bass virtuoso Henry Grimes, who died of COVID in April 2020. A giant of experimental-minded jazz in the late 1950s and ‘60s, Grimes dropped off the scene so completely that he was presumed dead for three decades. After resurfacing in 2002, Grimes quickly regained his central role amongst exploratory improvisers.
Eager to play with the legendary bassist, Ribot called Chicago drum master Chad Taylor and trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr. for Spiritual Unity, a quartet focusing on the music of free jazz tenor saxophone great Albert Ayler (with whom Grimes performed and recorded).
The group continued after Campbell died, a trio documented on a magnificently craggy album “Live at the Village Vanguard” recorded in 2012. “That band went up until Henry couldn’t play anymore, so it had a rough trajectory in that sense,” Ribot said. “But the music we made together is the best music we played in our life.”
Even posthumously, Grimes continued to play a role in the new quartet coming together, as the first time that Ribot performed with bassist Hilliard Greene “was at the memorial for Henry last summer, though I’d heard Hilliard many times over the years,” he said.
After vaulting through “Bells” and some other Ayler tunes, “we really hit it off,” Ribot said. “Hilliard is a very dynamic person, a fierce warrior for contemporary jazz. I was trying to figure out how to continue the project with Chad, and this group is my answer to the question. We’re just beginning to get it going.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
MARC RIBOT
70th birthday celebration and tour
San Francisco: 7 p.m. Sunday Sept. 22; SFJAZZ Center Miner Auditorium; $25-$95; www.sfjazz.org
Santa Cruz: 7 p.m. Monday Sept. 23; Kuumbwa Jazz Center; $47.25-$52.45; www.kuumbwajazz.org