Marc Ribot meets Charlie Chaplin in Orlando this week

“A film score to life” is what guitarist and composer Marc Ribot calls his upcoming performance at the Dr. Phillips Center. The singular musician is set to play a solo interpretive soundtrack to Charlie Chaplin's 1921 comedy classic (or dramedy, as we'll discuss), The Kid.

Neither need an introduction, but ... Chaplin is a comedy giant whose shoulders others still stand upon. Ribot is one of the most prolific musicians of our time. With boundless diversity, his guitar has graced the music of everyone from Tom Waits to Norah Jones, Elton John, the Black Keys and Gal Costa, along with a long list of his own projects. Equally at home with Latin, no wave, nu jazz, crooners, folkies, pop stars, punk rockers and film scores — it's all fair game in Ribot's musical realm. His membership in the seminal Lounge Lizards led bandleader John Lurie to state that "Marc is a musical genius. So many ideas are coming out of that guy that it is actually often a problem." Not a bad problem to have.

This will be an evening of dual genius, in which the past and the present collide physically and historically. Ribot will soundtrack the film with an acoustic guitar that's as old as the film itself — as are some of the underlying issues expressed in the story. Which is where our conversation with Ribot began ...

You mentioned this is “a film score to life.” Would you elaborate on that?

In the movie Charlie Chaplin plays a very poor single man, his signature Tramp character, who winds up through strange circumstances raising an abandoned child. The film shows how it affects him along with Chaplin's character's relationship with him, which is a theme I play to intermittently throughout the film.

What a lot of people don't understand was that the set of this film was a detailed reconstruction of the streets Chaplin grew up on in East London. So the extreme poverty and the extreme bleakness of those streets — that existed. When I was a white middle-class kid growing up in suburban South Orange, New Jersey, in the 1960s United States, that kind of poverty seemed a million miles away, a million years away. Of course it wasn't a million miles away; people were living in equal poverty a few miles away in Newark and in many other areas of the world. And it wasn't a million years away.

That's why this film is still relevant today, a century later. It's sad, perplexing and, at the same time, darkly funny.

We're now further away from the time when I was a kid, and from the time that the movie The Kid was made. One of the reasons I was interested in the film was that after the crash of 2008, it dawned on me that this was history! This happened to people, it's happening to other people right now, and it could happen to us in the future. We're not immune to history, we're not inoculated against history. When we look at the landscape of The Kid, when we look at this kind of desperation, it's not in the ghetto of the past. It could be us in five years, and for some of us now.

A lot of Chaplin's films have awesome physical comedy but I think he always wanted people to see what he experienced as a child. When I score it, I don't always play it for laughs.

Speaking of, your performance along with the film — does it come from your Silent Movies album, which includes The Kid in a four-minute run time?

Silent Movies doesn't exactly correspond to the film. It was a bunch of ideas that had a visual function like a film score, and again, a film score to life in that I felt [they] had an atmospheric quality in a way as if they existed in the real world. I do use some of the themes from that record and the melodies when scoring this film. I work according to motifs in the film.

This must be where the rubber hits the road? That Marc Ribot musical magic that you're renowned for!

The film is not a setlist. It's not where you play one song after another. The different visual and emotional elements of the film get their own theme, but I'm not just repeating a piece of music. I might modulate it. Break it down in certain ways. Play it faster or slower, maybe reharmonize it. You tie the musical themes to the emotion and dramatic and comedic pieces to the themes of the score, giving it unity and power. There's that kind of Charlie Chaplin chaos, where stuff just goes crazy. There's one scene with this tough guy character who tries to beat up Charlie and other moments like that, that deserve their own theme.

What works in film scoring isn't simple repetition, but development. Where you take a scene and treat it differently. In different contexts, but there is something that you are repeating, maybe just a few notes from the melody of another scene or character's theme, and as these repeat over the course of the film, the way it develops is what gives the score its power.

Late-breaking news: OW has heard from a very reliable source that Ribot will play a brief set of solo material to open the evening.