Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and Marc Ribot

An iconoclast guitarist and fixture of New York’s downtown music scene for decades, Marc Ribot lends his distinctive musical personality to a live score for a special screening of Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 silent masterpiece, The Kid.

Ribot’s bluesy avant-roots guitar playing defined the sound of Tom Waits’ acclaimed albums of the 1980s and ’90s, and in his own work he has explored the legacy of free jazz hero Albert Ayler, Cuban bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez, and Haitian classical composer Frantz Casseus. Ribot channels all these influences as a counterpoint to Chaplin’s slapstick and sentimental story of an abandoned child and his adoptive father.

“[Ribot’s] presence meshed so seamlessly with the film that it seemed almost not to exist on its own…a tour de force” (The Wall Street Journal).