As a session guitarist, Marc Ribot is known for his ability to produce perfectly rough-hewn parts on the fly. But it takes the busy New Yorker two passes before he’s totally happy with his band Ceramic Dog’s origin story.

At first, Ribot cites Karlheinz Stockhausen as both an inspiration and a cautionary example. The late German composer, he explains, got into all kinds of trouble for calling the 9/11 attacks “the greatest work of art that exists for the whole cosmos”. It’s a viewpoint he has some sympathy for, up to a point—and at that point he starts over.

“I mean, I lived a lot closer to the event itself, and I didn’t have the same set of feelings that he had,” Ribot clarifies, on the phone from his Brooklyn home. “But in the weeks and months after 9/11, we all did a bunch of benefit gigs and reasserted a sense of community in the face of all that. And it was good that we did the gigs, but almost nothing that got played could live up to the needs of the moment.…and I wanted to put together a band that could do that, that would have the power to speak in that situation. And I decided, for some reason, that I wanted it to be a rock band.

“That said,” he adds, “the original inspiration was very serious, but we’re also pretty goofy.”

Seriously goofy, in fact. With Shahzad Ismaily’s electric and synthesized bass lines providing a relatively calm centre, the hyperkinetic drummer Ches Smith and the often abrasive Ribot whip up the kind of manic art rock that’s become a New York City trademark. Think Swans or the Velvet Underground, but laced with a kaleidoscopic compositional sensibility that Ribot traces back to his love of Ornette Coleman’s electric music.

“What was interesting about [Coleman’s avant-funk band] Prime Time is that he didn’t take those players and make them swing,” he says. “He didn’t make them play what was previously known as jazz. Instead, he had a wider understanding of jazz, or he had a wider understanding of his project in music, which could be transposed into the group, into what the players were already doing. I think you can bring that perspective to a lot of different kinds of music, and so I think—I hope—that that’s what we’re doing with Ceramic Dog.”

The band is also a vehicle for Ribot’s songwriting—and while he’s not going to eclipse his occasional employers Tom Waits and Elvis Costello in that department, his acerbic wit is his own.

“The basics are always war, famine, and fighting with my girlfriend,” he says. “You know, the same old!”

But he’s quick to correct the impression that he’s simply venting. “I like to think of it as sublimating,” he notes. “It’s like I’m singing a song about someone, and I’m managing to keep my mouth in front of a microphone and not bite them. But I’m just barely managing, so they shouldn’t rest easy.”

That’s certainly evident in “Masters of the Internet”, from Ceramic Dog’s sophomore effort, Your Turn. Kicking off with the lines “Download this music for free/We like it when you do/We don’t have homes, or families to feed/We’re not human like you,” it’s a scathing denunciation of online thieves and weasels, and a continuation of the work Ribot has been doing with the Content Creators Coalition, an advocacy group for intellectual property rights.

“Free speech means the right to say what you want to say. It doesn’t give you the right to sell what I said,” he points out, adding that YouTube and similar sites are businesses, not a community service. “They profit from selling ad space to advertisers, and the more content, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more they get for ads. And they don’t care if they have the consent of the artists or not—but consent matters, in music and in many other human interactions.”

The TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival presents Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog at the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts next Friday (June 24).