Marc Ribot’s Map of a Blue City is uneven, unsettling, intriguing, and surprisingly warm but not easily accessible to most. It comes off, probably just as he intended, as a late-night conversation that goes in several directions with the prevailing theme about feeling lost. Even though this is the first time Ribot has added vocals, this is not of the singer-songwriter variety but more as spoken word meditations over his customarily inventive guitar work. Given that many of these songs, some thirty years old, began as home demos, Ribot is mostly delivering a solo album. Yet the production work, which we’ll get into in more detail later, adds twelve other musicians on select tracks. A few familiar names from the Creative Music scene appear here, such as cellist Christopher Hoffman and percussionist Ches Smith, yet only “Daddy’s Trip to Brazil,” with Doug Wieselman on flute and saxophone, feels like a full band track. Only two tracks have drums, for example.
As you’d expect from the free-ranging Ribot who has been visible across many genres, he mashes up roots, bossa nova, noise, free jazz, and the genreless. These are Ribot originals except his bizarre treatment of the Carter Family’s “When the World’s On Fire,” to which he added some lyrics, and his set-to-music 1949 poem from Allen Ginsberg, “Sometime Jailhouse Blues.” To hear Ribot talk about the former gives you an insight into his unique artistry. He says the song is “a hungover post-punk echo of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s famous Wave, importing the ennui of a late-capitalist touring musician into the tropicalismo paradise.” Huh?
Yet much of the material is cerebrally dark. Opener “Elizabeth” deals with his father’s death. “For Celia” beseeches God in the wake of a maritime tragedy. Yet these, couched as songs, don’t have much melody, and Ribot seems to struggle to articulate the lyrics, which are often not easily decipherable. “Say My Name” sounds like he invited another vocalist into the studio, as he sings (yes, sings) in falsetto.
The title track speaks to the central theme and was sourced from his daughter. When she was a child and he a young father, she drew a map of a city in vivid blue. When he praised her blue map, she corrected him: It’s not a blue map, but a map of a blue city. The song is a rumination on those feelings that accompany being lost, not only confusion and fear, but the excitement about what may lie ahead. It is also symbolic of the journey to get the album to its final state. He wrote some of these songs in the 1990s and made lo-fi, intimate home recordings. When he sent the first version to a label, the response was ‘too dark.” He never fully gave up, as these songs stayed with him through the years. In 2014, he attempted to work them through with his late friend, the acclaimed producer Hal Willner, thus the strings and other instruments. Ribot wasn’t all that enamored, preferring his demos, so the result was another false start. He wasn’t sure how to proceed until he met producer Ben Greenberg (of Brooklyn industrial band Uniform). Greenberg integrated the feel of the demos with the refined studio elements, thereby delivering the final product. The map finally made sense.
Fear not, Ribot guitar fanatics. There is sumptuous and dazzling guitar work throughout, and the album ends with a lengthy instrumental, “Optimism of the Spirit,” that blends the ambient and “noise,” the trademark, uniquely Ribot sound over percussion.
Ribot succinctly sums up the album, “There are some hard truths and cold observations in these songs. I wanted the room to be small enough so that we couldn’t turn away but warm enough to feel like you’re hearing it from a friend.”
To these ears, he’s right about the warmth and intimacy. It would have helped to have an inset with lyrics as in many cases they could be more audible. Nonetheless, it deserves several listens because this is as uncluttered as Ribot as ever sounded.
