Cyro Baptista
Banquet of the Spirits

What does "banquet of spirits" mean? And why in one of the photographs inside the booklet does Cyro Baptista seem to be portrayed by Francis Bacon and has a spherical mouth like the world that takes up half his face? A sentence, right in the center of the booklet, explains everything: "Anthropofagia equals cultural cannibalism".

This singular concept, on which the entire Brazilian culture is founded, is the main legacy of Oswald de Andrade, a modernist who in the early decades of the 1900s wrote two manifestos: Manifesto da poesia do Brasil and Manifesto antropofago. In the first, published in '24, he argued that his country's literature was "the most backward in the world," and therefore, as he suggested five years later in the second, it was necessary "to assimilate foreign experience in Brazilian terms and recreate it with indispensable local qualities, which would give the final product an autonomous character and the ability to function, in turn, in an international confrontation as an export product." Metaphorically, the brilliant de Andrade recovered an exquisitely Brazilian myth that had been removed with some disgust for centuries, that of anthropophagy, applying the cannibal ritual to international cultural relations. "From that moment," writes Veloso in Tropical Truth—"the scene of the indigenous people eating the priest Don Pero Fernandes Sardinha thus came to symbolize the birth of Brazilian culture, the very foundation of nationality".

If we consider that Brazil, according to a common saying—which has some reason for being—is the most musical country in the world, it will not surprise us if the appeal made by de Andrade to the literati was accepted mainly by the musicians. Probably the greatest anthropophagists were indeed those "tropicalists" (like Veloso himself, his sister Bethania, Gilberto Gil, and Tom Zé) who in the '60s devoured the spirits of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, João Gilberto, Ray Charles, Amalia Rodriguez, and Stockhausen (but towards the end of the '60s, one of them would also feast on the New York no wave!) to create splendid music that, during the military dictatorship—when only the "national" samba canção was tolerated—also assumed enormous political significance (costing Veloso and Gil imprisonment and exile, just as happened in Argentina to Piazzolla where the "Tango Nuevo" was equally unwelcome to the colonels). We could legitimately ask ourselves whether a Villa Lobos, who nourished on European cultured music, producing the "Bachianas Brasileiras", or in the old continent, a Bartòk who, having assimilated Strauss and Debussy, created a deeply Hungarian work, were not already anthropophagists. Certainly, everyone today is a cannibal. Good and bad music comes from all over the world, and even the most conventional rock bands cannot plug their ears in their carefully soundproofed venues.

Regarding Baptista, the conditions for him to be a voracious "devourer of spirits" are all there: he is Brazilian, an adopted New Yorker, a friend, and collaborator of people like Arto Lindsay, and, last but not least, for a long time a member of Tzadik, a famous village of highly sophisticated anthropophagists perennially led by John Zorn, the most cannibal of all. Compared to previous works also rich in contaminations, the genres that cross this latest record of his are truly diverse, although obviously Brazilian music (and in particular the baião favored by the percussionist) remains the glue that—according to de Andrade's principles—should give the whole "an autonomous character."

However, something—as we notice right away—does not work quite properly. Normally Baptista's music is so rich in syncopations that it modifies the reality around us and exuberant like only a teenager can be when they truly start to loosen up, yet all this vitality squandered by him and his collaborators does not always manage to infect us. After "Tutuboli"—which is appreciated for Cyro's percussion work and the very tender central theme—we are slightly disappointed by the version of "Bird Boy" which, despite Ezra Blumenkrauz's suggestive oud interventions, is much less fascinating than the original written by Don Cherry for Vasconcelos, revealing itself as mostly an innocuous ride for Brian Marsella's Hammond solos. "Macunaima" is a frenzied track about schizophrenia (the subtitle is "a hero without a character"): after the theme's presentation in 5/4, a frenzied walkin' is interrupted by the blaring sax of John Zorn introducing an interlude between ska and surf music. Following the walkin's resumption, a heavy mid-tempo with Zorn in Painkiller version follows and, after a predictably chaotic moment, with an accordion background, Cyro Baptista shows us that it takes a very meager vocabulary to communicate with French girls: "Bonjour madàme, je suis le pétit chocolàt! Baguette...". After the sound of a kiss and the walkin's resumption, the track ends with the initial theme's return (the listening is not much more exciting than reading this description of mine).

The delightful "Mumukata" is instead a cross between Milton Nascimento's "Txai" and the Japanese music of an Ikebe Shinikiro (the composer of Akira) and equally beautiful is "Nana & Tom" (based on "Water of March" by Jobim). The wonderful ones are "Tupinambas" (with Friedlander on cello) and "Argan", a Middle Eastern song in which the voice of Hassam Ben Jaffar and the oud of Blumenkrauz dominate, absolute protagonists in "Lamento mourisco". The shadow of Milton Nascimento seems to hover also over the elegiac "Malinye" and indeed it even seems that Baptista is attempting an improbable imitation of the "minas angel's" singing style. In the last track, the percussionist expresses his view on the topic of "Anthropofagia" explaining that Brazil was a land where continuous orgies were practiced, which could not be tolerated by the Catholic colonizers, but the repression did not succeed in extinguishing the enormous voracity of that country which since then began to devour everything in its sight. Accompanied by a melody very similar to "Malinye"—which here, however, becomes progressively more epic, if not Morricone-like, with the organ doubling the choruses in the crescendo—the recitative of Baptista seems, for its content, both a child of Zorn's irony and in line with the tradition of samba exaltação, the samba that exalts the beauties of the land from which—get it into your skulls once and for all—the most beautiful popular music on the planet originates.