The tennis was over, and the eggs were nearly gone. Marco Benevento sat at the kitchen table with his wife, KT, working through the last of breakfast, with a flight to Alabama in the morning and, between now and then, a day in the studio.

Getting there means crossing the yard, and crossing the yard means passing the birds. Eight peacocks arrived years ago in a carton about the size of a shoebox, mailed from a hatchery in Georgia, and they have had the place ever since. Chickens are simple. At dusk, they file into their house, and you shut the door. Peacocks are not chickens.

“You look up and they’re all on the roof of the house,” Benevento said. “They can fly 200 feet in the air.”

Past the birds and the outbuilding where KT makes jewelry and prints shirts is the building that used to be a three-car garage. Benevento converted it into a studio about four years ago. Inside are pianos of nearly every size, including one from the 1920s built small enough to fit inside a train car. He poured a glass of chilled wine and began rolling a joint, an easy ritual before an afternoon of making music.

“I searched for them on Craigslist all the time,” he said of the pianos, each with a story. He spotted one in a photograph of a storage unit in Hudson and paid $90 for it. He had gone hunting for the small ones because he wanted to tour behind a real piano without dragging a Hammond organ and Leslie cabinet across the country. He screwed guitar pickups onto the back of one, ran it through a Fender Twin, and kept himself off digital keyboards for a decade.

“Glera,” released July 24 on Big Crown Records, was made in that room. It is Benevento’s first album for the Brooklyn soul label.

Glera is a white grape grown in Italy’s Veneto region and used to make prosecco, and the record is partly inspired by Italian influence that shaped Benevento’s upbringing. The opener is called “Frizzante,” and other tracks include “Crema,” “Sprezzatura,” and “Quattro Passi.”

The album began three years ago as a private exercise, with Benevento writing toward the melodies of Italian film scores and no particular destination in mind. Then it kept getting bigger. Marianne Mirage sings on “Turandot,” a widescreen, haunted track the label situated somewhere between Portishead and Serge Gainsbourg. Big Crown calls “Big Top” “circus funk.” It is built partly from voice memos and the calls of Benevento’s peacocks.

Running a full-fledged studio from home has added another dimension to Benevento’s work.

“I’ve essentially added another job into my life,” he said. “Touring and playing is the best, and I do it all the time, but to actually be able to work and be very productive at home is also really fun.”

Benevento, 49, grew up in northern New Jersey, graduated from Ramapo High School, and attended Berklee College of Music. He stayed in Boston for a time because the gigs were good, then moved to New York after a teacher told him Boston was the bullpen and the city was the field.

In 2000, he took a loft in Bushwick with his Hammond organ, piano, and upright bass, during an era when his car was broken into regularly, and practiced eight hours a day.

Then kismet struck because he had to use the bathroom.

Benevento was in line at Tonic on the Lower East Side to see Medeski Martin & Wood when he ducked across the street into the Lansky Lounge. A band was playing downstairs. The drummer was Joe Russo, whom he had not really seen since Franklin Avenue Middle School in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, in 1990. Back then, Russo had handed him a copy of “Moving Pictures” and asked whether he had ever heard of Rush.

“He was clearly not fully realized, as neither of us are,” Russo said of the kid he had known. “But the thing that has always been a through line of Marco is incredible joyful energy.”

They reconnected and exchanged numbers that night. Benevento hired Russo for a Wednesday-night quartet gig at a Moroccan restaurant in Manhattan. Then Russo was offered a Thursday residency at the Knitting Factory’s Tap Bar that paid $100 for the night, and he called his friend so they could split it.

“We each got to get 50 bucks a night, every week, and all the Heineken we could drink,” Russo said. “And that’s what birthed the duo.”

“Dude, that’s freaking grocery money for the whole week,” Benevento said.

He drove the organ in from Bushwick every Thursday for a year. Tapers started turning up. Musicians from Soulive and the Slip sat in. What the two built during that residency was less a repertoire than a wiring diagram between two people.

“Just with a glance of our eyes, or not even, ending up in these similar spaces without any sort of conversation,” Russo said. “It just became so synchronistic immediately.”

There was no bass in the band, and no one seemed to miss it. Dave Dreiwitz, the bassist who has long held down the low end for the New Hope, Pennsylvania, art-rock band Ween, met the two around 2004. Russo had turned up at a Ween show, and Dreiwitz learned about Bustle in Your Hedgerow, the instrumental Led Zeppelin project Benevento and Russo ran on the side. Dreiwitz made his pitch accordingly.

“I told Joe, I said, if you guys ever want a bass player,” Dreiwitz recalled. “Marco would play bass with his left hand.”

The Benevento/Russo Duo quickly built a following, playing hundreds of shows over the ensuing years. By the mid-2000s, Benevento and Russo were touring amphitheaters with Mike Gordon and Trey Anastasio of Phish, playing venues including Jones Beach and the PNC Bank Arts Center.

Benevento and KT moved upstate in 2011 with their two children, looking for a driveway, a mailbox, and some trees. He remembers setting his younger daughter, then about 18 months old, in the backyard and watching her feel the grass with her hands. He realized she had never really been on any.

Within weeks, Amy Helm was calling about work on her record, and A.C. Newman was calling about overdubs. Word travels in a music town, especially when someone new arrives to jam with.

Russo, meanwhile, had joined Furthur with Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. When that ended, he came upstate to visit. The two worked through a lot of picklebacks that night. Benevento, who had spent his youth deciding the Grateful Dead were too country and too old-timey for him, finally asked the question.

“Marco,” Russo told him, “I’m not gonna lie to you. I might ask you to play some Grateful Dead songs.”

That became Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, now 13 years and roughly 40 shows a year deep. Benevento’s conversion took. He buys Grateful Dead records now and has DJ’d sets of the band’s music at Bearsville.

Dreiwitz has spent most of those years in the seat beside him. The two pass the late hours in the front lounge of the tour bus playing cassettes for each other. The game has rules: One man plays a song, then the other has to top it. Art Blakey’s “Blues March.” An old Meters tape. Punk records Dreiwitz suspects his friend has never heard.

Bus televisions being what they are, with roughly 10 remotes apiece and no clear relationship among them, they do not watch much. The last thing they got working was “Jaws.”

Asked what people do not know about Benevento, Dreiwitz did not reach for a story.

“He always manages to keep everything he does, particularly musically, very positive,” he said. “I’m not quite sure how he manages to do that. It makes him kind of an enigma. He doesn’t let things get in the way of positivity.”

The garage, meanwhile, has become a gathering place. Leon Michels comes up. So do Lady Wray, Bobby Oroza, Brainstory, and the drummer Homer Steinweiss.

Lee Falco, a drummer from Marlboro who plays on “Glera” and spends much of the year touring, first met Benevento around 2015. Falco was fresh out of high school and starting to find gigs around the Hudson Valley. Benevento seemed to be everywhere: Bearsville benefits, events at the barn, and the annual Bob Dylan celebrations for Family of Woodstock.

“Marco is full of joy. He just exudes joy, and it’s infectious,” Falco said. “He has always been very generous with his time, to be part of the community and the scene. He helps foster this great community that we have up here.”

Russo’s description is the one that may outlive them all.

“It’s a mix of complete genius and the most almost childlike levity,” he said. “Someone with that much talent, and to be essentially the human form of a golden retriever, is a cool mix.”

Benevento no longer practices eight hours a day. An hour with a metronome does it, an exercise he calls mental floss.

“A little moment of Zen, just to, like, slow down time and figure out what I don’t know,” he said.

He will play Bearsville Theater on Oct. 21 with Brainstory and DJ El Michels Affair.

Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.