Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, Capilano University Centre for the Performing Arts, tonight at 8 p.m. For more information visit coastaljazz.ca.
A ruse got him into the band.
There was talent, timing, and that similarity of taste that turns into musical kinship – but if it wasn’t for one eggshell-white lie – Ches Smith might never have hit drums for Ceramic Dog.
Bass player Shahzad Ismaily asked if Smith ever heard of a guy named Marc Ribot.
Marc Ribot? The guitarist who turned Beatles tunes into blues licks that sounded more like the Mississippi Delta than Liverpool Bay? The guy who kept up with Tom Waits when the illegitimate love child of Frank Sinatra and his whiskey-lubricated piano were going places they’d never been before?
That guy?
Yeah, Smith had heard of him.
“He’s looking for a drummer and I was wondering if you wanted to come out and maybe try out for this new band in New York,” Ismaily said – or at least, that’s how Smith remembers it.
Smith has a tendency to be busy. He crafts jazz-tinged, twisted pop for MadLove, he and Ismaily concoct musical experiments for Secret Chiefs 3; his sticks whisper across the cymbals when playing jazz for Tim Berne’s Snakeoil and they pound the snares like they owe him money for metal group Tanks.
Stuck between not quite believing Ismaily but not quite disbelieving him, either, Smith prepared for his audition date – which he was assured had been confirmed.
“I found out later that it was the morning of the so-called audition that Ismaily had actually got a hold of Marc and set it up for the same day,” he says. “Not even close to confirmed at all, but it somehow magically worked out.”
Playing with Ribot presented its own challenges. Musical charts can resemble slapdash inkblots, but Smith reports that Ribot’s charts verge on the Rorschachian.
“He’ll just write it down once and then work with that, which means a lot of crossing out and then sometimes arrows pointing back at the thing he crossed out, like, ‘No, I do mean play this, actually.’”
Smith, Ismaily and Ribot became Ceramic Dog.
“What’s unique about this band,” Smith explains, “especially for a New York band, is we just get together to practise and write for fun.”
After initially cultivating the kind of sound you’d cross the street to avoid passing on the sidewalk, Ceramic Dog has lessened their hostility – a bit.
Their most recent release, 2013’s Your Turn, opens with a track that marries grunge-like guitar distortion to singalong choruses that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Lynrd Skynrd record.
The standout track is likely “Masters of the Internet,” an incendiary tune backed by a rhythm made for stomping with a vaguely Middle Eastern melody wrapped around a chant.
They don’t have homes or families, Ribot spits at online music thieves, “We’re slaves who only live to serve the Masters of the Internet.”
“The earliest stuff was most aggressive,” Smith explains. “And then it’s also teetered on this balance between metal music and more groove-oriented stuff.”
Smith has a long history of teetering.
As a kid, drumming was almost a neighbourhood sport. His big brother set off for a house down the block full of young kids playing fills and drum rolls, and, in the spirit of little brothers everywhere, he followed.
“I was just trying to hang with the big kids,” he recalls.
Smith played along with his mom’s Beatles records, later incorporating influences from Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts and Led Zeppelin madman John Bonham.
At 16, he found jazz.
“I had a drum teacher, he was always telling me about Tony Williams on Miles Davis records,” Smith remembers. “He was also into a lot of rock and punk rock, so he was someone I could trust.”
He fell under the spell of Williams, Elvin Jones, and legendary drummer and bandleader Chick Webb.
“It wasn’t long before that was all I was listening to.”
That emphasis on improvisation is part of the reason Smith can pivot from dark metal to blue jazz without missing a beat.
“I like the challenge of playing a lot of different kinds of music,” he says.
He’ll likely have that challenge tonight at Capilano University.
“Marc had this idea that all three of us individually – without talking to each other – are going to bring in setlists to see if we magically all wrote the same setlist,” he says, laughing. “I’m going to jam mine full of the newest things.”
