Cyro Baptista’s Banquet of the Spirits

“A joyous, carnival-like treat.”—All About Jazz

Born in São Paulo, but a leading world citizen of New York’s vibrant Downtown scene for many years, master percussionist Cyro Baptista has collaborated with a wide variety of top talent—from John Zorn, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson to Yo-Yo Ma, Trey Anastasio of Phish, and Caetano Veloso. While he’s been lauded for lending his quintessentially Brazilian flavor to diverse musical settings, Baptista has also gained deserved attention for the bands he leads himself—notably his four-piece Banquet of the Spirits.

In Baptista’s dynamic quartet, drummer-percussionist Tim Keiper, bassist-oudist Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, and keyboardist-accordionist Brian Marsella buoy their leader’s sonic blend. Exemplars of today’s avant-world scene, Banquet of the Spirits are deeply inspired by the Brazilian philosophy of anthropofagia, or cultural cannibalism. This notion arguably informs all forms of art-making in Brazil today as it expresses the country’s eagerness to devour a wide variety of sources, digest them, and come up with a uniquely Brazilian synthesis that in turn reflects the country’s long history of colonization and diverse, multicultural population. The quartet feasts on Afro-Brazilian sounds, samba, and freewheeling jazz, as well as Indian, Arabic, Celtic, and Aboriginal music, among other inspirations. Join us in our performance space as the group serves up “a diversity of sounds and colors that can't be found anywhere else. This is global exotica of a kind so wonderfully weird and cool that it's a must-listen.” (All About Jazz)