Guitar virtuosos Paul Pigat and Kevin Breit guaranteed to deliver surprises in concert
The revered musicians share an obsession with eccentric instruments
Paul Pigat.
Kevin Breit.
CapU’s Global Roots Series presents Paul Pigat’s Guitar Cabaret Featuring Kevin Breit on April 23 from 8 to 10 pm at The BlueShore at CapU
AS PROBLEMS GO, it’s a good one to have—but it’s still a problem. And today’s problem is trying to decide how to start writing about Paul Pigat and Kevin Breit, who are continuing their ongoing cross-country guitar summit in the Lower Mainland this month.
There are a number of approaches that might prove fruitful. One would be to conduct the interview in character: after all, Breit has made an entire album and a short mockumentary in the guise of Johnny Goldtooth, who’s hard to explain but is essentially Link Wray’s Canadian cousin, revived after having been in a cryogenic coma since 1969 or so, while Pigat’s Cousin Harley persona hews closer to what you’d have if Merle Travis had trained his nephew to become a hopped-up ’50s rockabilly star. Johnny and Harley would get on well, no doubt, but the trouble here is that my alter ego, Jimmy the Shoe, don’t talk much, having learned to get what he wants with a simple flick of an eyebrow or crook of a finger.
So that’s off the table.
Another tack would be to go full-on guitar weenie. Between the three of us, Breit, Pigat, and I own way too many instruments, and in the last couple of years Pigat has also emerged as a skilled luthier. During the course of our Zoom interview, Breit tells us about his new Spy guitar from the Ontario master Joe Yanuziello, which walks the gaudy side of tasteful with a top covered in floral washi paper. Pigat waves a rare Willner acoustic six-string in front of the camera; he and I both share a passion for these peculiar creations, made in B.C. during the 1930s and ’40s by the eccentric and reclusive Hugo Willner. And, not to be outdone, I do the same with my own latest find, an ornate Jersey Girl electric guitar made by a team of three craftspeople on Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido.
Not everyone shares this mania, however.
We could talk about how Pigat and Breit met, which is pretty much the way that Breit and I met. Having been tipped off that this amazing band had a regular Monday-night residency at the Orbit Room, a downtown Toronto club owned by Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson, each of us started making sure that whenever we were in Toronto we had Monday night off, so that we could bask in the blazing brilliance of the Sisters Euclid, Breit’s long-running and recently retired quartet.
In the case of the Breit/Pigat connection, there’s a twist.
“I know how I got to know you: because of family!” Breit tells Pigat. “Because your dad was married to [Sisters Euclid drummer] Gary Taylor’s wife’s mother, and I kind of knew you then. Later on, Gary would tell me about this really happening guitar player who was, like, Tony Pigat’s son. And I’d go ‘Oh, where does he live?’ And he’d go ‘Vancouver.’ So I went ‘Paul?’ That was kind of wild. I found that really strange, that you were the same guy.
“Your dad seemed like a real character, too,” Breit adds.
“Oh, yeah, he’s a character.”
“A one-legged cop! That is incredible. An Italian one-legged cop. I love it. Of course you play guitar. There’s a song for you in there.”
“There’s many songs.”
At this point I have to butt in to ask if one of those songs might be “Old Stumpy”, which Pigat and Breit recorded on 3 Ring Circus, their online-only release as the Shut-Ins. I don’t quite get a straight answer.
“Well, it is weird and lopsided, which is the way my father is,” Pigat replies. This, naturally, launches Breit into a long and winding soliloquy on the nature of inspiration, centred around “Humble Me”, the song he wrote for his one-time employer, Norah Jones.
“The world was writing songs for Norah Jones,” he begins. “Everybody was. She got songs from Tom Waits. Steve Earle wrote for her. I think Lucinda [Williams] did. Countless songs. It was amazing who was sending her songs, and everybody in the band was writing for her. But I wasn’t. It didn’t seem logical to me, but then she actually said ‘You should write a song for me, so if I record it you could move to New York and I could take care of your kids.’ And she’d say this all the time, so I started writing—and this song came from thin air.
“I kept this song forever,” Breit continues. “I mean, literally it was in my back pocket. It’s cringey to me when people say ‘Hey, wanna hear a song?’ I’ve been that guy that’s been on a road trip with people and they’re playing their fucking demos and you have nowhere to go. If they’re not good, what do you do? You’re feigning interest, and I didn’t want anyone to do that, like ‘I have a song,’ and it’s a shitty song.’
“But long story short, that song is recorded. Norah does it, and it makes the record. But what’s really, really funny is that years later, after I wasn’t playing with her anymore, I went back and said ‘I’m actually going to learn that song. I wrote it; I might as well play it.’ So I got the lyrics together, and I was blown away. Every word in that song was about her! And I remember that when her mother heard the song—I was there— she stormed out of the studio and said ‘It’s one thing to sing about, but it’s another thing to live it.’ And I thought ‘What a weirdo! It’s just a fucking song.’ And then I realized it was all subconscious. I was writing a song for Norah but I wasn’t writing a song about her—but it was. I thought I was being poetic, but it was like her mother had written it. If somebody had said ‘Is that song about Sue Jones and her relationship with, you know, Norah’s dad, who happened to be Ravi Shankar?’ I’d have said ‘Fuck, no.’ But it was, really. It was actually that.”
Breit had promised that this story would eventually circle back to “Old Stumpy” but it doesn’t, somehow. The point, though, is that it illuminates the creative process. What he’d done, essentially, is write about vulnerability in a way that Jones, then still in her early 20s, couldn’t—and frame it up in a way that she could sing. So how, then, will these two virtuosos—who between them could play just about anything written for the guitar—work that kind of emotional honesty into their concerts? (At The BlueShore at CapU concert on April 23, Pigat and Breit will be joined by Jeremy Holmes on bass and Nino DiPasquale on drums. The pair will also perform as Boxcar Campfire at White Rock’s Blue Frog Studios on April 30 live and via livestream.)
“Well, Kevin’s a really great communicator,” Pigat says. “He keeps his ears open. In our last interview someone said ‘Is it going to be a joust?’ And I said ‘No, it’s not going to be a joust. It’s going to be two birds flying in tandem, and hopefully we won’t crash into the same building.’
“I have some ideas of things I’d love to do, and I’m just going to broach them as the moments arise,” he continues. “And there’s going to be stuff where I don’t know what we’re going to do. We’re just going to go for it. Like, I’ve got a wonderful little two-part invention in G minor that I’d love to do, but I’m not going to tell you how it goes, ’cause I don’t even know how it goes!”
“G minor,” says Breit. “That’s the third-fret thing, right?”
Well, as Pigat replies, that all “depends how you tune your guitar”.
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