Cyro Baptista
September 26th, 2007 by Megan Romer
Among the many benefits of working in the arts is that you can do things like surf around YouTube for a couple of hours and call it “research”. While viral videos are perpetually entertaining, I do find myself repeatedly looking for videos of musicians with whom I’m familiar. Yesterday, I was browsing around to find a good video of Cyro Baptista and Beat the Donkey, whose polyethnic maelstrom of percussion, dance and song come together to form quite literally the most exciting stage performance I’ve ever seen. I thought, perhaps, it would be difficult to do it justice in a simple low-resolution internet video clip, and indeed, it was pretty tricky to find one.
What I did find, however, were some excellent clips of Cyro performing with a slew of amazing artists. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Cyro’s story, he’s originally from Brazil and he came to the US on a grant to study percussion. He’s a master of world music percussion, and an amazing innovator who invents incredible new instruments, and also uses items like jugs, garbage pail lids and even bubble wrap to extract their percussive sounds. His skill and innovation has led him to become perhaps the most in-demand percussionist in the business – he’s worked with Trey Anastasio (of Phish), Laurie Anderson, Tony Bennett, David Byrne, the Chieftains, Melissa Etheridge, Herbie Hancock, Yo Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin, Carlos Santana, Phoebe Snow, John Zorn, and a slew of others from wildly disparate genres. Beat the Donkey (a phrase which, in Brazilian Portuguese slang, means “get to it!” or “let’s do it!”) is his own project, his own vision, which incorporates percussion, dance and melody, exploring the musical identities of different cultures and bringing them together in a wildly wonderful performance.
Anyhow, I came across an amazing video of Cyro performing with Yo Yo Ma, Paquito D’Rivera and Kathryn Scott. He’s playing the berimbau, a one-stringed Afro-Brazilian percussive drone instrument. Be sure to note Ms. Scott’s inability to sit still as Cyro pulls the most amazing sounds out of this odd instrument.?Ǭ
