Cyro Baptista Banquet of Spirits @ Joe’s Pub 5/29/08

That was an excellent show! It’s actually Cyro’s band, AthropoFagia with a new name. The New Yorker said the quartet “pays tribute to the global reach of the late jazz trumperter Don Cherry and his seventies trio Codona … “

Between the 4 musicians, they had 35-40 instruments on that stage. Brian Marsella had several different keyboards, that African vibe-looking thing, and a few other things, maybe 8-10 instruments. Shanir Blumenkranz had his electric bass, oud, and a sintar. The rest were the 2 percussionists, Cyro Baptista and Tim Keiper, who I think is in all of Cyro’s projects, at least the ones I’ve seen. I bet Don Cherry could play every instrument up there.

It was awesome world music. I also realize that Cyro is one performer who can add his performance pieces right in with the music in such a way that I love. Usually, I get turned off when they switch to humor or other types of performance because I just want the music. But Cyro just incoporates that stuff into the music and it makes it awesome and quite entertaining.

I saw AnthropoFagia at Tonic when this was super new. I think it’s evolved since then as my remembrance is it was more free back then. This was more worldish. It was awesome from start to finish.

I think one of the first times I saw Cyro and Tim was at The Stone during the Don Cherry festival, curated by Adam Rudolph. I think that was Oct 2005, yes it was:
October 1–23, 2005 at the Stone
A Don Cherry Celebration
curated by Adam Rudolph
On the tenth anniversary of the passing of this luminous being, colleagues, collaborators and torchbearers perform Don’s compositions and play new music inspired by his creative spirit.

I went to almost every one of those shows until about 10/15, when I went out of town. It was the first time I even heard of Don Cherry and every night was amazing. There were percussionists every night and people who used to play with Don or learned from people who played with Don. I got a lot of stories about Don in that time. Lot of percussion and it set me further down the path of exploring world music.

Anyway, I’m very happy this quartet exists. I got the CD, and I really like it. They did everything from the CD last night and I hope to get to it again. I do like it live a little more, but the CD is great.