Jazz
Pi Recordings releases “Hurry Red Telephone”, the Marc Ribot Quartet album, on 30 October. There are six tracks and they come from two sessions with two different line-ups: the only constant besides the guitarist is Chad Taylor on drums and percussion.
“New Monster”, “Gnat” and “Rara” have Hilliard Greene on bass, and the two tenor saxophonists never cross paths: James Brandon Lewis plays on the first track and the last, Brian Settles only on “Gnat”. David Watson’s bagpipes sound once on the whole record, on the opening track. On “Faucets of Terrible”, “Ghost of Sleeping” and “Nan Guinan”, Sebastian Steinberg plays bass and Briggan Krauss alto saxophone.
Four of the compositions are Ribot’s and two are by Frantz Casséus, the Haitian guitarist and composer who taught him. One of them is “Rara”, which Ribot recorded alone in 1993 on “Marc Ribot Plays Solo Guitar Works of Frantz Casseus”: there it was one minute forty-four of solo guitar, and here it runs five thirty-six with the quartet.
The group’s name comes from a line in Richard Siken’s poem “Several Tremendous”, which traces how the poet rebuilt his ability to write and to speak after a stroke took both away. Of the music the label says it is “composed, but never contained”, and that its structures are “launchpads for improvisation”.
The album comes out on black vinyl, red vinyl, CD and digital.
Text by Aina Torrents