In mid-2020, Mexico City’s music scene struggled to survive the economic downturn caused by COVID-19. Folks who believe in mutual aid looked for ways to invest in their communities. And people fortunate to have safe, paid work looked for ways to share their “fortune” with others.
Enter our years-long initiative El Zorro Supper Club, (EZSC) joining forces with Mexico City’s only jazz studio Pitayo Music to develop a concert series as a new way of mutual aid and income-generating work for musicians. EZSC is a monthly cross-cultural engagement project for 440 professionals from 44 countries around the world created to produce a closed-universe, captive audience of “donors”, for civil society outfits like my nonprofit PSYDEH and artist collectives like Pitayo.
With Pitayo, we offered Mexicans and folks around the world top-quality neo-soul and jazz music, and CDMX-based musicians and Pitayo got to do what they love doing for a dignified wage. What is more, 50% of the net income from each concert went to a new fund called Pitayo Cares MX Fund, a pot of money as critical support safety net for Pitayo’s staff and network of 23 Mexico City-based musicians.
Pitayo Music and its musicians were at the forefront of the national Mexican jazz scene and form the heart of this series. EZSC promoted the concerts to the Mexico City professional world and their networks worldwide using cocktail making as a concert teaser and our outreach to citizen groups like Ayuda Mutua CDMX, while acting as a virtual host for each concert via short intros like this one for our May 30, 2020 concert with American Todd Clouser and Mexican Alex Mercado.
Or our June 25, 2020 concert with Mexican musicians Luri Molina and Diego Maroto.
Why EZSC and this initiative?
We have always used artistic expression to link, bond and bridge people around the idea that, regardless of different language, culture, or profession, we humans share 
more than we do not.
Our free experiences are built to remind us how life is too short not to build meaningful relationships by paying radical attention to one another and our surroundings, not to participate in mutual aid, the key to our most complicated problems.
In so doing, we put into practice our theory on relationship building while celebrating the idea that people, no matter their language, culture, or profession, want to be part of something different, maybe bigger than themselves, and do so more readily with good food and drink.
Before COVID for example, and in our first cross-cultural event of 2020, we offered 35 people from seven countries an unforgettable evening with a high-end mezcal tasting and cocktail menu and acoustic neo-soul jazz tiny desk concert with the uber-talented French singer-songwriter and composer Flora Pasquet, accompanied by the Mexican double multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, and composer Juan Pablo Aispura and American multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger and composer Sly5thAve. In between songs, we learned about Flora’s journey from the French island La Réunion off the coast of Madagascar to Paris and then to Mexico City. Pablo shared about why jazz, Mexico, and his ancestors from Oaxaca and his Mexico City music studio La Casa del Arbol and Pitayo Music project with Flora. Sly talked about his journey from just outside Austin, Texas to New York City and Mexico City and his Sly5thAve and Club Casa Chamber Orchestra musical projects.
Past suppers promoted musicians from across the Americas, celebrated the work of Mexican non-profits and artists, or focused on such Mexico-centric themes as the search for “lo Mexicano” (Mexican-ess), el Dia de los Muertos, the origin story of Mexico City, Machismo, and art and Mexican civilization.
