Records: Marc Ribot's Shoe String Symphonies

Check out Shoe String Symphonies sound clips at
The Planet of Sound.

By Peter Jaros

When I hear "film music," one name comes to mind: John Williams. All of us have gleefully and ominously hummed the "Imperial March" from Star Wars while waiting to confront our masked arch-enemies, but it doesn't take long for melodramatic orchestral soundtracks to turn every moviegoing experience into an earful of Velveeta. Marc Ribot infuses the genre with a much-needed shot of Muenster. Complex, sometimes abrupt, even initially unpalatable, the 14 pieces on Shoe String Symphonettes span 10 years and too many genres to count.

Ribot's best-known work is the understated, dyslexically angular guitar he contributed to Tom Waits records like Rain Dogs and Swordfishtrombones. Symphonettes bears marks of this Ribot, but it is no guitar record. Ribot sometimes evokes Waits' barroom slouch and minimalist percussion, but he calls up everything from Villa-Lobos guitar preludes to Carl Stalling's "Looney Tunes" soundtracks to traffic jams. Symphonettes is one of a series of releases on avant-jazz demigod--some would say demagogue--John Zorn's Tzadik label. Most of these pieces first appeared in several independent films; the rest accompanied Aelita Queen of Mars, a 1928 silent film. Film's invisible momentum pushes Ribot's compositions into strange paths and unusual compositional structures--"You Kill Him" begins as a string and sax dirge punctuated by pizzicato bass before breaking into a driving Latin rhythm, and it never
quite returns.

Ribot doesn't fall into the triteness that haunts Zorn's pastiches, which jar but do not coalesce. Ribot finds common ground between Stravinskian horns and Afro-Cuban rhythms--the ironic sensibility of such mixed marriages is present, but so is the fact that it just works. Ribot is in love with all the sounds he uses; they aren't just tired signifiers for recognizable styles. He stretches instruments' capabilities and their recognizability, as in the flatulent trombone and thumb-piano-ish guitar in "Aelita Suite I."

Admittedly, Ribot occasionally sinks into postmodern sappiness and "experimental" noise clichés. But given the breadth of the experiments and successes on this album, a few nosedives are par for the course. Can film music fly solo without corresponding visual narrative? For Symphonettes, the answer is yes--with a spicy dollop on top.

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