Marc Ribot: Map of a Blue City

Ars Nova Workshop presents one of creative music’s most prolific and wide-ranging musicians, guitar innovator Marc Ribot as he celebrates the release of his new album, Map of a Blue City, at Solar Myth on September 29-30, 2025.

Revered guitarist Marc Ribot has released over 25 albums under his own name over a 40-year career, exploring everything from the pioneering jazz of Albert Ayler with his group Spiritual Unity to the Cuban son of Arsenio Rodríguez with Los Cubanos Postizos. His avant power trio/post-rock band, Ceramic Dog, continues the lineage of his earlier experimental no-wave/punk/noise groups Rootless Cosmopolitans and Shrek. Rolling Stone points out that Ribot, “helped Tom Waits refine a new, weird Americana on 1985’s Rain Dogs, and since then he’s become the go-to guitar guy for all kinds of roots-music adventurers: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp.”

The show will celebrate the release of Ribot’s latest album, Map of a Blue City (New West), a unique twist on the singer-songwriter tradition that bears the weight of the guitarist’s history gracefully, incorporating recordings made over nearly half of his life and reflecting on how he got to this particular moment.