Marc Ribot: Marc Ribot Y Los Cubanos Postizos

Marc Ribot's most familiar work may be his sideman stints with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, but Ribot is also a longtime member of John Zorn's skronk-jazz posse. Like Zorn, Ribot sometime leans toward formalistic genre-hopping; his virtuoso guitar work jumps from jazz to surf to soul to improv to punk to klezmer, sometimes within the same song. But he's best when he sticks to one style, and his Los Cubanos Postizos ("The Prosthetic Cubans") project does just that. Riding a resurgent wave of Cuban music, Ribot seems to take this material (mostly Arsenio Rodriguez covers) seriously. This means America's preeminent avant-garde guitarist gets to have fun here in a way that hasn't been heard since his Painted Desert collaboration with Ikue Mori and Robert Quine. Y Los Cubanos Postizos begins slowly and quietly with "Aurora En Pekin" and gradually picks up from there, with Ribot leading his compadres (including percussionists E.J. and Robert J. Rodriguez, bassist Brad Jones, and organists Anthony Coleman and John Medeski) through cool numbers like "Como Se Goza En El Barrio" and "Choserito Plena." The record is about as authentic as any of Ribot's other stylistic excursions, but it's far more straight-faced and therefore decidedly respectable.