An elegy for Sisters Euclid, the best Canadian band you never heard

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After 27 years together, Toronto quartet Sisters Euclid played its last ever shows earlier this month. I would say that we are going to miss the band now that it’s gone, but most of you missed it altogether.

At the Rex Hotel Jazz and Blues Bar, guitarist and front man Kevin Breit wore a jester’s hat when he introduced the last number for the final show of a four-night farewell run. “We’re going to do our hit song,” he said, referring to Tumbleweed Tea. The all-instrumental piece – Sisters Euclid has no singer – jangled, jazzed and twanged at breakneck speed for quite some time.

It is not a hit – the Sisters have none of those. Breit, in addition to being one of the most talented Canadian guitarists of his generation, can joke with the best. Some jesters make people laugh, but the better ones can make them cry.

“This is Sisters Euclid,” Breit said at the Rex, before correcting the tense. “This was Sisters Euclid.”

It is a crying shame that the inquisitive quartet without a best-before date is saying goodbye.

Why is it disbanding? “I love it too much to keep it going,” Breit told me between sets. Translation: He does not want the band to languish.

Sisters Euclid was chic for a hot second, back in the early 2000s when it was packing the now-defunct Orbit Room every Monday night with its far-out and peculiar fusion of rock, roots and jazz, with the phenom Breit as the star attraction. It never built on that momentum, though. The Sisters kept that old Orbit Room fanbase of diehards, but didn’t expand on it in a major way.

Breit is not an operator. He used to be in Norah Jones’s band, appearing on her double Grammy-winning album Come Away With Me with jazz heavyweights Bill Frisell, Brian Blade and Sam Yahel. (He even wrote a song, Humble Me, for her follow-up record.) He left her band, though, because he wanted to spend more time with his family.

Writing a story on him back then, I asked Breit whether he could help me get a quote about him from Jones. He said no, even though he knew what such a public endorsement would do for his career. “I just don’t want to impose on her,” he told me.

Well, one man’s imposition is another man’s taking care of business, and Sisters Euclid was never much into the latter. The group didn’t tour hard or heavily promote itself. And now, with all the members aged 60 and older, there does not seem to be much more to accomplish. A niche band, Sisters Euclid was never everybody’s cup of Tumbleweed Tea in the first place.

In 2000, an influential critic from Now Magazine wrote that Sisters Euclid was “all smoke, no flame.” Though it didn’t kill the band, it didn’t help. Twenty-three years later, at the Rex, Breit broke out the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’.

“Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen,” he sang, “and keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again.” We do not hear much from that Now magazine writer any more. Sisters Euclid outlasted at least one of its detractors.

Onstage, the Sisters were stout as ever. Drummer Gary Taylor ratt-a-tatted with care and bassist Ian de Souza rumbled heavily and gently at once. Keyboardist Mark Lalama, a newcomer, swirled on his instrument with a sense of poise and mischief. Having been with the band for only 15 years, he was just getting warmed up.

The wiry notes screaming and scribbling out of the virtuoso Breit’s ratty Fender amplifier came fast, but never furious. The other three musicians did not back him as much as they had his back. While Breit’s guitar work is spikey and angular, he is actually devoted to groove and melody.

Breit once described the band’s approach as “wide open garage music.” Which is as good a label as any. An original Sisters Euclid song was always negotiable on stage. And any song the band decided to cover was a suggestion of possibilities: Where can we go from here?

A version of Neil Young’s Helpless was evocative. A native of McKerrow, Ont., Breit replaced Young’s vocals – “There is a town in North Ontario” – with an emotional electric slide guitar. There was nothing standard to Sisters Euclid. The band evaded conformity as if it were a cancer – or worse, a cliché.

Breit has released numerous solo albums and other records with a diverse group of collaborators. Some of the Sisters songs appear elsewhere in alternate forms and under different titles, with lyrics. We got a glimpse of that at the Rex, where Breit briefly presented some of the words to A Fool Left Behind, which is the stripped-down essence of the Sisters’s Mapless.

He sang briefly about diamonds, pearls and envelopes filled with money. “The game has rules; some win, some lose.”

Its achievements hidden but not insignificant, Sisters Euclid never played the game. The group can be seen as an abandoned, one-off prototype that managed to survive smally but brilliantly on its own for nearly 30 years. The writer Hunter S. Thompson had a line about its kind: “Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”