Supergenerous

Talented nomads. Musical mercenaries. Hired guns, have instruments, will travel.

Even in era of digital downloads, Internet performances and sample stews, a select cadre of musicians is still called upon to turn music into magic. Paul Simon, Cassandra Wilson, k.d. lang, Herbie Hancock, Laurie Anderson and even John Zorn have employed these musical magicians to add just the right spark, the perfect color that can turn a good track into something truly great. They have all found those colors and casts in percussionist Cyro Baptista and guitarist Kevin Breit, a.k.a. Supergenerous.

Riding that ragged surf somewhere between the atmospheric soundtracks of Ry Cooder and Daniel Lanois, the otherworldly boho sounds of the Latin Playboys and the organic, cosmos warping jazz of the Charlie Watts Jim Keltner Project, Supergenerous bring something new to the ball. Call it frisson, fission, a meeting of two like-minded souls from either side of the great US divide who reinvent its country, jazz, folk, and funk in their own mighty wild hair image.

“A lot of people think that with a duo you are going to hear pots crashing and it will be cacophony and no melody or a little odd and challenging,” says producer Craig Street (Cassandra Wilson, Holly Cole, Meshell Ndegeocello). “These guys are all of that, but their music is also highly entertaining and really fun. Audiences just go nuts.”

Supergenerous‘ thirteen tracks could be called the sound of two nuts. Two highly skilled and emotional musicians who bring beauty and nuts to the proceedings, loosening up the joint and making the musical juice fly. They’ve done it with the aforementioned artists, but their debut is a chance to concentrate their efforts into a unique, personal whole. As they have with others, their debut glories in a diverse sound cavalcade.

From the Speedy West boogie of “São Paulo Slim,” to the urban beauty of “Dreamin’ of a Train/Take The A Train,” then off to Mars with the loco techno of “God’s Parking Lot” and the flip-floppin’ majesty of “Steinbeck,” then “Marisa O’Brien”! This mad Irish babe is dancing a mambo in some Mexicali painting by hot rod artist Robert Williams. And there are moments of acoustic beauty, such as the Celtic-sounding “Brouhemia/Calhoun,” the globe-circling trance twins “Pelicula” and “Caravan/Camel, Sand & Caravan,” Pancho and Lefty’s getaway song “A Sigh And A Shiver,” and the joyous “Love Is All Around,” a.k.a. the Mary Tyler Moore theme.  Cassandra Wilson even guests on a spooky  “Home On The Range.”

Having contributed to Holly Cole’s Temptation and then Cassandra Wilson’s New Moon Daughter, the Brazilian Baptista and Torontoan Breit initially met on a Town Hall gig. Soon the pair were jamming and composing in Baptista’s New Jersey garage.

“We worked from the concept that we would make music for a film that didn’t exist,” explains Breit. “Not that it would be a soundtrack, but only that our music would dictate a scene. So you could see what was happening from the music. That was the simplest way for us to look at it.  It was that way for half the record, the other half was a wing and a prayer.”

It’s hard to pin down the Supergenerous style. Is it country? Is it jazz? Neither, both? SG’s roots are in Cyro’s São Paulo and Kevin’s small town Canada, but their style is too global to be local, and too intimate to be strictly urban.

“We’re so far from Nashville, what we do is not like Lynryd Skynyrd,” laughs Breit. “The music from Canada is married to east coast forms which are very Celtic in nature, with country and Canadian rock. So it comes from northern Ontario and São Paulo. This is a hillbilly Brazilian record. It is a hybrid of those two completely distinct cultures. I do think that we were honest and true to the school. It is very geographical.”

Cyro, ever the romantic, has a different take on their sound. “In Brazil we play soccer, we dance samba with the feet, and the girls, they move their hips. In Brazil there is a lot of activity in the south part of the body. But in the US they play basketball, baseball. That is the north hemisphere. So this has both of those worlds together.”

What also makes Supergenerous unique is their eclectic instrumentation. Kevin plays a wide array of instruments, all of which are at least 30 years old: mandolin, mandolo, mandicello, a Nashville steel guitar, acoustic guitar, tenor guitars, electric slide guitar, and something called a “Guitorgan” on the enchanting “Marisa O’Brien” and elsewhere. “That was made in the 60s, a funny little instrument. It imitates the sound of a cheap organ.”

One of the modern percussion gods, Cyro also emptied his treasure chest into the record, playing surdo, Balinese gongs, symphonic bass drums, cowbells, metal refrigerator drawers, snare drum, cymbals, and many instruments of his own design.

“I made many of the instruments myself,” he explains. “I use PVC pipes that I play with flip flops, an instrument that I developed in the 70s. I use organic percussion, things that I’ve made from branches of trees, from seeds, and also a lot of [native] instruments because I had the opportunity to travel so much especially with Paul Simon. Every place I go I try the local percussion. My house looks like a percussion museum.”

So what’s in a name, Supergenerous?

“Any explanation as to what it means is just me bullshitting,” states Breit. “I just like the way it sounds. And the way it looks. It is a good name to give us a wide-open palette to do whatever we want. There are a lot of earth tones on the record, a supergenerous helping of them. It gave us an excuse to go crazy. I could bring in nineteen guitars and go for something rich and Cyro could bring in all those unbelievable instruments.”

Cultures joined, at the hip, kicking and screaming in the creative fruit of something new.

“When you go into the studio to create something you are always imagining,” muses Breit. “It is important to tell a story from one viewpoint. One person thought it was about the prairie, with this underlying theme of cactus, caravan, a train, they all have this lilt of being prairie-like. So I took a ruler and put one end on São Paulo where Cyro is from and one end in McKerrow, Ontario, where I am from. The middle point was in Fiji.”

Supergenerous comes down to process and magic and inspiration and chemistry and the rare talent that spills out of God’s Parking Lot, one in Brazil, the other in Canada. “Cyro brings out the tightrope walking element of my musical side,” says Breit. “And the nature of it being duo makes it wide open. It is just the two of us. In trying to make it big and full we play totally different than we would if we were just adding a splash of color.  We’re more like a bucket of paint as opposed to a paintbrush. It is pretty intense.”