Ribot performs with Los Cubanos Postizos at the Malta Jazz Festival in Valletta, Malta in 2001. (Darin Zammit Lupi/Reuters)

Pop quiz. Name the musician who has worked with the following artists:

a) Classic rock legend Robert Plant and jazz pioneer McCoy Tyner.

b) Crackly voiced trip-hopper Tricky and crackly voiced crooner Marianne Faithfull.

c) Soul preacher Solomon Burke and shock rocker Foetus.

d) Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Simpsons comedian Harry Shearer.

The answer to all of the above is Marc Ribot.

Despite his massive, high-profile sessionography, Ribot’s name is hardly on the tip of everyone’s tongue. While his performance and recording schedule doesn’t permit much time for self-promotion, with Ribot, it’s less a matter of time than inclination. He’s something of a rarity: a self-effacing lead guitarist.

In fact, even when he’s fronting a rock ’n’ roll band in a sweaty club, Ribot prefers to sit down on stage. In a rare interview conducted prior to the recent Guelph Jazz Festival, Ribot addresses the matter in a manner both thoughtful and jokey. Taking into account the time he has spent playing with Los Cubanos Postizos, Ribot cites the influence of seated solo acoustic gigs as well as pure laziness.

“And also,” he adds, “it’s post-phallic guitar playing. I don’t want to be a standing-up guitar hero. I remember this club called Ouch where I used to do collaborations with DJs; if there were live musicians, they put us behind a screen so you couldn’t see us. The biggest compliment someone could give you there was, ‘Man, I thought you were just part of the mix.’ They weren’t aware that you were even in the room. I found that pleasurable.”

While most studio musicians tweak their style to suit the project at hand, Ribot’s guitar playing is recognizable in almost any context, including pianist McCoy Tyner’s album Guitars, released last month. Ribot’s sound is scalpel-sharp and his ideas at once lyrical and angular, as if he’s wrenching out shards of raw melody from guitars loath to give them up.

While growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, Ribot studied with Haitian folk and classical guitarist Frantz Casseus, who had a commitment to, as Ribot puts it, “introducing the music of Haiti into the ‘realm of transnational art.’ ” Casseus’s sense of mission encouraged his protege to cross cultural boundaries with his own music. When he moved across the river to New York City in the ’70s, Ribot played as a sideman with acts in all manner of genres, and eventually helped invent new ones with his own projects.

Ribot has long had a vexed relationship with musical sincerity. He went from backing up rock and R&B singers such as Chuck Berry and Carla Thomas in the late ’70s to joining John Lurie’s fake jazz band, The Lounge Lizards, in the early ’80s. At the time, Ribot recalls, “Everybody said, ‘Oh yes, ironic,’ or ‘postmodern,’ and we thought Italian film-score jazz was more interesting than the rest of what was around. We liked things cheap and bad. I still have an affection for that, but we were over it by the mid-’80s. All this stuff about irony raises a question: ‘Well, OK, what would you play without irony?’ It’s not necessarily a question that I’ve been able to answer, but I’ve tried.”

The recent Party Intellectuals, an album recorded with his power trio Ceramic Dog, takes a clearly postmodern approach, mashing up styles that include Latin rock, avant-funk, freaky free improvisation and lounge pop. On the track Todo el Mundo es Kitsch, Ribot sings with feigned enthusiasm about driving an Audi in Frankfurt and striking it rich in Monaco. The song sends up a kind of cultural tourism, Ribot says, “in which music has to be identified with some vision of a local culture that’s recognizable to Europeans or Americans as authentic.”

Another of his targets is classic rock and its pretensions to being transgressive. Party Intellectuals opens with a manic cover of The Doors’ Break on Through that points out the irony inherent in the original performance, which is decidedly staid in contrast. “A lot of rock musicians are always talking about being wild and crazy and breaking through to the other side,” he says, “yet they always remember to change chords after four bars. If you want to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk.”

Marc Ribot. (Jim Cooper/Associated Press)

Ribot continues to prod at what’s real and what’s fake with his two closest kindred spirits: Tom Waits and saxophonist/composer John Zorn, both of whom have managed to find a distinctive voice despite pursuing a number of varied styles. Ribot’s first major-label studio session was for Waits’s 1985 album, Rain Dogs; since then, Ribot has been the American iconoclast’s guitarist of choice. (Waits’s gruff, off-the-wall singing often seems to resemble Ribot’s playing.) Zorn, with whom Ribot has collaborated since the Ennio Morricone tribute The Big Gundown (1984), is also a genre-straddling wizard. He knows Ribot’s approach so well that for a listener, it’s often difficult to tell which passages Zorn composed and which ones Ribot improvised.

Last month, Ribot played a day-long residency with Zorn and a who’s who of the New York City avant-garde at Guelph’s River Run Centre. The guitarist often took up the lead role with breezy licks, shuddering solos or squalls of noise, while Zorn conducted the ensemble from the chair beside him. Ribot didn’t entirely forego theatricality: walking on stage for an improvised duet with drummer Joey Baron, the professorial guitarist, with his suit jacket, shock of grey hair and red-rimmed granny glasses, kicked his axe off its stand, crouched down and scrabbled at it as if trying desperately to uncover treasure. The ensuing squawks were both disturbing and bracing.

Indeed, there are signs Ribot may be emerging from his shell. Party Intellectuals, he says, proves “I’ve lost whatever inhibitions I might have had about singing.” For another, he’s planning “a really big birthday celebration” in New York next May, where he plays with his own projects at different venues over the course of a week.

Ribot had an unaccustomed moment in the spotlight earlier this year when he released his solo acoustic album Exercises in Futility. “The day before it came out,” Ribot recalls, “I got a phone call from Billboard [magazine]. They asked, ‘What chart should this record be listed on?’ I thought it would be a good joke if I said, ‘It’s a classical record.’ So they said, ‘Oh, OK.’ For a few days after it was released here, it was actually at #1 on the classical charts. I actually outsold Yo-Yo Ma and everybody else — it must have been a really dark day at Deutsche Grammophon.

“And then when it dropped off, [the album] basically disappeared. But I was king of the hill. I had my 15 minutes.”

Mike Doherty is a writer based in Toronto.