Music I enjoy: Marc Ribot & Ceramic Dog

This evening I got to add Marc Ribot to my ever-growing collection of concert stubs. He played at Mississippi Studios with his band Ceramic Dog.

His style is difficult to pin-down. I'll sum it up by calling it... adventurous. And pointing you to this article about him in the Oregonian. You can also watch what appears to be an entire Ceramic Dog concert on YouTube. I only watched a little bit of it, but it captures the general spirit of the thing, albeit at a much more reasonable volume.

I went with a friend and tried to recall exactly how I'd come to hear of Marc Ribot. He's known for playing with Tom Waits, but I remember being surprised by this fact. My earliest recollection was probably from the Masada Guitars album — part of a John Zorn project. I'd purchased the album because I had just gotten into Bill Frisell, who is on there as well. Bill is great, but something about Marc's playing on this particular album spoke to me and I became a fan.

Curiously, I'd never given Ceramic Dog much a listen. I'd been much-more into his solo guitar efforts and  a project of his called Los Cubanos Postizos (The Prosthetic Cubans). The latter is surprisingly more straightforward than a lot of his other stuff, though you'd never necessarily know that if you watched this:

Tonight's Ceramic Dog show was great though, save the unexpected event about halfway through where a woman collapsed near the front. The show stopped and the paramedics were called. I hope she's alright... A cursory Twitter search tells me she may have had a seizure. Not to make light of the situation, but if ever there were a soundtrack designed to induce seizures...