Canja De Boa, a collective that specializes in several genres of Brasilian music, has only officially been performing together for less than 10 years. But the connections the four band members have span much earlier periods in founder Kyle Canjar’s music career.
The ingredients for the band came together kind of like a bowl of good soup – which is basically what Canja de Boa means in Portuguese.
“So, ‘Canjar’ is my last name, and ‘Canja’ is sort of a play on that, Canja is a soup but it’s also for when someone does a musical performance,” Canjar said. “And ‘boa’ means good, so kind of like good soup or good musical performance. And I like that it’s soup, because we mix a lot of good stuff in there, just like in a soup.”
The roots of the band can be traced to when Canjar, who lives in Flint’s College Cultural Neighborhood, was a college student at Wayne State University. He became intrigued with Brasilian music during his studies, so much so that he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to travel and learn there.
“I did my undergrad in classical (guitar), and I just took all of the jazz stuff that I could,” Canjar said. “They had this exchange program with Brasilian students, through the English department. So they would get a lot of Brasilian students who would come here to do English, but not a lot of English majors who would go to Brasil, so they opened it up to other majors (to go). I heard about it and was like, oh my God, I’ve been doing this Brasilian classical music, I have gotta go down there.”
Canjar studied at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and absorbed as much of the culture and music as he could. He has continued incorporating aspects of Brasilian music and styles into his own performances, and found performers with a similar passion for the music in the process. Years later, when he was a faculty member at the Flint School of Performing Arts working alongside Pia Broden Williams, further groundwork for the band was laid.
“I met Pia, and she knew this one piece that I really liked to play,” Canjar said. “It was a (Heitor) Villa-Lobos piece and she sang it in Portuguese, and it sounded great. I was like, hey, if you ever want to learn some more stuff …”
Williams, who grew up in Beecher and attended the Flint Community Schools Magnet Program at Whittier Middle School and then Flint Central and Flint Northwestern high schools, taught voice classes at FSPA for 15 years and calls meeting Canjar there “kismet.” Their studios were next to each other. As an opera singer, including with Flint Symphony Orchestra and Michigan Opera Theatre, she’s familiar with singing in other languages, including French, Italian, German, and Latin. But Portuguese was not one she had experience with.
“When Kyle and I first did that Portuguese piece, it was an education,” Williams said. “Portuguese has completely different rules than all other languages. I loved the language and the way it sounded, but I was worried I was mispronouncing everything. And then I found out Kyle was fluent and if I had known that from the start, I might never have collaborated with him that first time, because that’s a little intimidating!”
That experience inspired Williams to learn more and more about Brasilian culture and music, and she said she “fell head over heels in love” with it.
“I started putting quite a few hours into listening and practicing and just learning the language,” Williams said. “I started doing Duolinogo and online classes. I’m nowhere near Kyle’s level, but I can understand a little bit now.”
Two other band members, Michelle Ureña (woodwinds) and Gordon Krupsky (pandeiro, tan-tan, percussion), also came together from Canjar’s musical past.
Canjar met Ureña at Wayne State when he went back there for his graduate degree, and he saw her playing then. Ureña has been performing in the Detroit area for nearly 20 years, and plays the saxophone, flute, and clarinet in styles that include jazz, Latin, classical, and popular. She also teaches.
“ I met Michelle at Wayne State when I was an undergrad and when I went back and did my grad work, I started in the jazz department,” Canjar said. “I started a Brasilian music ensemble there, and she was playing back then. She just liked it (the music) and had the knack for it and I have just been calling her ever since.”
Krupsky and Canjar met at a gig and hit it off over a shared interest in Brasilian music. Kruspsky writes and does musical arrangements for small instrumental ensembles and large wind bands and performs in musical theatre pits in the Metro Detroit area. He also teaches. In Canja de Boa, he has helped the band acquire sometimes difficult-to-find instruments.
“He does a wonderful job of recreating a percussion ensemble for us,” Canjar said. “He started buying up instruments, and you can’t just walk into a Guitar Center and find some of these percussion instruments, so he’s finding them and ordering them from all over the world. He’s just been studying how this music is supposed to sound, and his rhythms and interpretation, it sounds just like you’re in Rio sometimes.”
Although Canjar, Williams, Ureña, and Kruspsky are the “core four” members of the ensemble, they often invite other musicians to perform with them, giving them different lineup talents, sounds, and variations depending on the performers they’re working with. That model also fits well with Brasilian music, which has varied, diverse genres and styles. The band ‘s music includes amba, bossa nova, afoxé, maracatu, and baião. They also incorporate other genres, including adding Brasilian twists to popular American music and songs.
“I think that we bring a lot of fun and a lot of energy,” Williams said. “The music is just infectious, you hear it, and you can’t help but tap your foot. You can’t help but feel like you want to dance. It will make you wanna move. It’ll make you wanna dance that samba.”
The band has performed at several venues in Flint and in the Detroit area, and they also were the house band at Fogo de Chão Brazilian Steakhouse in Troy, an experience that Williams said really allowed them to perfect their craft.
Canja de Boa has a website and Facebook page, and can be booked by contacting canjadeboa@gmail.com. For Canjar, he’s motivated in part by just introducing music and culture that he’s passionate about to new audiences. That can be difficult since many of their songs are not in English, but the beauty of the music is that it can create connections with listeners even if they don’t understand the lyrics.
“When I hear something new, I get really excited,” Canjar said. “So I kind of feel like that whenever we meet someone new who really gets into it. There’s this excitement when you can turn somebody onto Brasilian music. Brazilian music, it just hits a little different with me.”
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