Constant curiosity ensues. From tours of Japan and Europe, to a film score, to last month’s benefit to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Ribot has been riding a carousel of projects. He teases he’s retiring to work on his billiards game. But it looks like the next train’s coming around real soon and it seems he won’t be able to resist. This month Ribot graces the bill at two of New York’s landmark performance spaces. On May 14 he joins Peruvian singer Susana Baca at Joe’s Pub, two days later he’ll be at Symphony Space with Chicago tenor sax player Fred Anderson and drummer Chad Taylor.

All About Jazz: How are you able to grasp and express such a varied sound?

Marc Ribot: I’m a nervous person. I change what I do often. I’ve been around 47 years, so I’ve come into contact with a lot of things that I like. I’m looking for the same things in a lot of these different areas - Intense experiences. For me that’s something I’ve found in Albert Ayler, Arsenio Rodriguez. I hear a punk energy in a lot of places other people don’t seem to.

AAJ: What sparked your desire to venture into these different realms?

MR: I started listening to Albert Ayler after a few people pointed out that I was going into the same territory with my bands. I started listening to his stuff and I thought yeah, there’s some kind of common ground. With the Postizos, Anthony Coleman gave me an Arsenio Rodriguez CD and I was interested in that for different reasons. It was more about guitar playing and going back and exploring in more depth the way I was playing in the mid-80s. For example on the Tom Waits album, there was a Cuban influence. I wanted to see who exactly created that sound that influenced me.

AAJ: What about your more avant-garde stuff?

MR: Sometimes you just love to make noise. It’s what you have to do I don’t know if it’s avant-garde. That’s not the word I use.

AAJ: What do you use?

MR: Noise. Avant-garde is like a train and I’m in front of it. There is a train but it’s going in a circle. So it’s not clear whether being in the front or back matters. I’m criticizing the use of the word avant-garde. I don’t think there’s a linear movement. I think I just play weird stuff. I wouldn’t use the word avant-garde to describe it.

There’s a lot of different kinds of weird stuff. Each has its own story. John Zorn uses noise elements but in a very formal sort of way, different than Albert Ayler. There’s a lot of different ways to be weird. Not that I’m trying but I play a lot of different kinds of things. But when I have to ask myself what really needs to be on a record, I always go back to Albert Ayler and this kind of sound for some reason.

AAJ: Is there a certain style that you’re most comfortable with?

MR: I don’t think musicians should have styles. I think they should just try to work with somebody and try to make sense. Sometimes that means playing tonally, sometimes that means playing atonally, sometimes with a sound from the fifties, sometimes with a sound from the sixties. Sometimes it means playing with a sound nobody’s ever heard before. The main thing is the music makes sense. Not that you sound like you did on the last record.

AAJ: Is it sometimes difficult to adjust?

MR: I don’t always adjust to the sound. Sometimes I force the sound to adjust to me. John Lurie once said something very meaningful. "What you realize when you’ve done it for a while is that all music works with any image, but all music changes every image." It’s the same with being a side musician, or adding a track. Almost anything you play can work, but almost anything you play changes the meaning. I try to create meanings that aren’t too offensive. At least not to me.

AAJ: What is it like playing with Susana Baca?

MR: She’s a real interesting musician, very intelligent. She’s a musicologist really. People get the impression from listening to her that there’s a place in Peru where everybody plays like that. It’s a beautiful image, but she and her band draw on Mexican, Peruvian, Brazilian, Cuban, they draw from a lot of sources. The band is a really incredible band. I’m not sure what they need me for. I go along for the ride. I can barely keep up. I can’t keep up in fact. It’s something I do because…well, wouldn’t you do it?

AAJ: What’s your history with Fred Anderson?

MR: We have no history whatsoever. I have a lot of sympathy with the current Chicago scene. There’s a whole bunch of improvisers who have come up on that scene who are great. So we’re going to jam. I’m looking forward to it with gusto. He’s a real interesting musician. So… we’ll improvise.

AAJ: What about Chad Taylor?

MR: I’ve heard some of his CDs. I think they’re great. So we’ll jam, what more can I say?

AAJ: La Cubanos Postizos evokes a strong sensual emotion while at the same time extreme jubilance.

MR: I’m glad that comes across. Playing is kind of a ritual in which you channel these things. In which you try to get people to feel something as a group. Music doesn’t express emotion directly. People don’t express sad music because they’re sad. When people are sad they cry. You need a certain distance to play music. When people are happy they jump and when they’re angry they hit something. They don’t have the control needed to play the chords on the guitar. All the emotional stuff is mediated through guitar playing.

AAJ: There’s a line in your "Earplugs" essay from John Zorn’s book Arcana that I love. "Somewhere along the line an inflation occurred in the currency of romantic pain, and the price of our musical fix was more than mere notes could pay."

MR: What I was thinking about was the way people signify pain in music. People believe we gain redemption through suffering. I have noticed that the amount of suffering required to gain this status seems to have been inflated to unbelievable degrees. There’s a difference between Frank Sinatra having a mildly dejected experience in the 1940s, and Yamataka Eye screaming as if he’s being gutted by a blunt pencil.

Music doesn’t directly translate pain. The punk tradition, which that screaming derived from was invented by white men, or boys who had no reason to think that as a group they were in more pain than for example black women. At the time that was invented we were more likely to be singing disco.

AAJ: Tell me about these recent film projects you’ve worked on.

MR: I did a film score for The Killing Zone, by a new director Joe Brewster. Some of the stuff in the film score has appeared in a dance score I did for the choreographer Wim Vanderkeybus, a Belgian fellow. I did another dance score for Yoshiko Chuma, the choreographer for the Hard Knocks Dance Company.

AAJ: What does it sound like?

MR: It has a lot in common with the Shrek stuff I was doing with strong elements of Japanese theatrical music. One of my inspirations for Shrek had been this music that I heard at a Japanese baseball game. They have a sort of battle of the bands. Brass bands. The music was extremely brutal. I liked it.

And the Vanderkeybus stuff, this one 11-minute segment of it is this mostly sub-based feedback with a lot of noise in it. It goes in a lot of different places. I would like to edit it all into something.

AAJ: Have you been working with John Lurie, John Zorn or Tom Waits at all lately?

MR: I haven’t worked with Lurie in quite a while. I would be all for it. I played with Zorn in London recently. We did a performance of The Gift. Tom Waits… One never knows. He could call tomorrow, or he could call in five years… or not at all. I would be quite happy to go out there if he wanted to do something together. He lives in California. I love working with him. He has my number.

AAJ: What will you be doing now?

MR: Mostly solo concerts and stuff with the Postizos…work on my billiards game and think about the next big thing.

This interview first appeared in the June 2002 issue of All About Jazz: New York.