The stringer

FIRST STRING In-demand guitarist Marc Ribot emphasizes his own projects during a festive week.

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

One of the more curious aspects of Brooklyn's renaissance as both a residential and cultural oasis is that it has mirrored the slide into irrelevance of the term downtown—once the city's catchall for everything hip and edgy happening in lower Manhattan. But don't go thanking real-estate agents just yet: Marc Ribot—a guitarist whose name has been nearly synonymous with the usage since the 1980s, when he regularly gigged with bands like the Lounge Lizards and his longtime friend John Zorn at any number of spaces below 14th Street—cites trombonist and scholar George Lewis, the head of Columbia University's Institute of Jazz Studies.

"Have you read his new book?" Ribot enthusiastically asks over coffee, referring to A Power Stronger Than Itself, Lewis's imposing 2008 history of the AACM, a Chicago musicians' collective. It's not lost on us that we're chatting at his walk-up on a quiet street in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill. "I can remember articles in The Village Voice that said downtown was dead in 1985," Ribot says. "I don't know that it's dead, but [Lewis's book] has certainly deconstructed it past the point of no return. Musically speaking, it will not heretofore be used without quotation marks."

That's probably not the only reason Ribot isn't using the term to market a weeklong 55th-birthday retrospective series that opens on Saturday 9, even though five of the six venues in which it takes place are below Union Square. "There are various symbols of continuity," he says, referring as much to the return of his Albert Ayler tribute band Spiritual Unity as he is to the Stone, Zorn's Avenue B venue, which will host projects Ribot debuted back in the Knitting Factory's days on Houston Street. "The bigger question concerns marginalization," Ribot continues. "Whatever name you use to define the various traditions and composers working in new music—free or post-free jazz, all the hyphenated experimental rock forms—it's obvious that funding is limited, and the scene has not truly reconstituted itself since the closing of Tonic."

While Ribot's concern about the scene is genuine (he was arrested during a protest the day Tonic closed in 2006), it can't mask the fact that his engagingly angular guitar conception is in demand elsewhere. He's been a staple on the recordings of Tom Waits for decades, and the day before our interview he was finishing up soundtrack work for Spike Jonze's upcoming feature, Where the Wild Things Are. "For various complicated reasons, my records may not sound like some of the things I've been involved with," he says. "But it's not like being a side musician means being a slave. In the best situations, it's often like film music; you're hired to add a layer of meaning to the project."

Ribot's willingness to stretch is best exemplified by something another close friend, keyboardist-composer Anthony Coleman, says in The Lost String, a recent documentary that follows Ribot around his former Lower East Side stomping grounds. Coleman reputedly gave Ribot the tapes of Cuban music giant Arsenio Rodriguez that inspired him to create the skewed Latino music of his breakthrough band Los Cubanos Postizos (translation: "the fake Cubans"). "I see Marc as a player first, conceptualist second," Coleman says. "He conceptualizes through his playing." Indeed, when you look at Ribot's current projects, from his serrated-edge rock trio Ceramic Dog to his duets with former Ayler bassist Henry Grimes, it's clear that each grew out of the needs of a player still discovering and renewing himself through fresh sounds. That kind of voraciousness is its own reward, transcending geographical distinctions.

First call

Top artists have been tapping Marc Ribot's skills and versatility for decades:

1985: Tom Waits, Rain Dogs
Ribot came aboard for the second disc in Waits's avant-pop makeover, which netted the future hit "Downtown Train."

1989: The Lounge Lizards, Voice of Chunk
The title track of this John Lurie–led CD includes a Ribot solo for the ages, deep in the pocket with twangy shards all over.

1991: Elvis Costello, Spike
Saturday Night Live flashback: Can you still hear Ribot breaking a string during his "Let Him Dangle" solo?

1996: John Zorn, Bar Kokhba
Ribot's achy tremolos accentuate the kinder, gentler side of Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture aesthetic.

2008: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand
Summoned by T-Bone Burnett to help with what became Grammy's Record of the Year, Ribot displayed his most rustic chops.

Marc Ribot plays the Brecht Forum Sat 9, Rose Live Music Sun 10, the Stone Tue 12 and Joe's Pub Wed 13.

See more in Music