“I don’t want it to be heard as a concert. I want to disappear, which is what good film scoring does,’’ he says, on the phone from his home in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, N.Y. “If the effect is done perfectly, people will think they’re seeing what they’re, in fact, hearing. It’s a kind of alchemy.’’
Ribot has made a practice of musical alchemy over more than 25 years recording and performing. His resume as one of the most in-demand session men in the business - credits include work with Tom Waits, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and Elvis Costello - complements his work as a shape-shifting trailblazer within New York’s forward-thinking downtown music scene. (He and fellow avant-guitar hero Nels Cline share the cover of the current issue of DownBeat magazine.) Over a dozen current projects are listed on his website, divided by categories as disparate as “free jazz,’’ “punk/funk/soul/noise’’ and “latin descarga.’’ (It’s a song from John Zorn’s “The Book of Heads,’’ by the way, that requires the destruction of balloons.)
Tonight’s performance brings together Ribot’s long-running interest in film scoring with the visceral, in-the-moment improv for which he is probably better known. The score is not “through-composed,’’ he clarifies, but a series of themes he weaves together in an extended improvisation. The titular theme from his score for “The Kid’’ appears on his 2010 album “Silent Movies,’’ a collection of self-contained pieces meant to be suggestive of films.
“It was a kind of musical image-making or musical storytelling, as an analog for a movie. The songs are movies,’’ he says in a quiet, deliberate tone. “I’m interested in that kind of crossover both ways, of sounds that create images and images that suggest sounds.’’
