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Full
album 20-20 of
American jazz fusion band
Spyro Gyra.
The Unwritten Letter
05:07
Ruled By
Venus
09:57 20-20
15:24
Three Sisters
20:06
Sweet Baby James
23:59
The Deep End
30:34
Together
35:06 Dark-Eyed
Lady
40:01
South American Sojourn
44:13
Rockaway To
Sunset
50:02
Return Of The
Pygmy
As Spyro Gyra contemplates upcoming milestones to its storied career, it’s tempting to fall back on the
Grateful Dead lyric, “What a long strange trip it’s been” to describe it. During that time, they have performed over five thousand shows, released twenty-nine albums (not counting “
Best Of…” compilations) selling over ten million albums while also achieving one platinum and
two gold albums. These upcoming milestones include
2012, which will be thirty-five years since their first album release and 2014 will be forty years as a band. They show little
sign of wanting to slow down either, gaining
Grammy® nominations for each of their last four albums.
Born in
Brooklyn, bandleader
Jay Beckenstein grew up listening to the music of
Louis Armstrong,
Charlie Parker,
Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie, and started playing the saxophone at age seven. Beckenstein attended the
University at Buffalo, starting out as a biology major before changing to music performance (read classical and avant garde). During summer breaks, he and an old high school friend, keyboardist
Jeremy Wall, played gigs together back on
Long Island.
Wall attended college in
California, and after both graduated, Beckenstein stayed in
Buffalo’s thriving music scene, where Wall eventually joined him.
Spyro Gyra, whose odd name has since become world famous, was
first known simply as “
Tuesday Night Jazz Jams,” a forum wherein Beckenstein
and Wall were joined by a rotating cast of characters. Tuesday just happened to be the night when most musicians weren’t playing other gigs to pay their bills.
Around this time, a young keyboardist named
Tom Schuman began sitting in when he was only sixteen years old. This young man, of course, remains a member to this day.
"
Don't forget the interminable Dead-like solos we were taking," Beckenstein cracks. "We were the kings of self-indulgence, but eventually we earned our right to charge a quarter at the door. It was a complete shock when word of our psychosis got out and we started packing them in!"
The group’s increasing popularity – combined with the purchase of a new sign for the club – prompted the owner to insist that Beckenstein come up with a name for his band. “It began as a joke. I said ‘spirogyra,’ he misspelled it, and here we are thirty years later. In retrospect, it’s okay. In a way, it sounds like what we do. It sounds like motion and energy.”
In their earliest days, Spyro Gyra took their cues from
Weather Report and
Return to Forever – bands whose creative flights were fueled by a willingness to do things that had never been done before. “I believed that we were springing from what Weather Report did,” says Beckenstein. “
I never thought in commercial terms. I just thought they were the next step in the evolution of jazz, and that we would be part of it.”
The first few years saw the group’s identity split into a dynamic live act and a producer centric recording process, borne out of the rotating cast of characters in the jazz jam beginnings. These albums were the product of the band and a great number of the top session players in
New York. In
1983, Beckenstein made the decision to make the albums the work of the band members he shared the stage with night after night, only supplementing with occasional guests.
There were several personnel changes in the
1980’s, which slowed down about twenty years ago.
Julio Fernandez became the group’s guitarist in
1984 and, except for a short hiatus at the end of that decade, has continued in that position.
Scott Ambush became the band’s bass player in
1991 making this the beginning of his third decade in the band.
Bonny Bonaparte joined the band in
2006 making him the “new guy” at five years.
"When we first started," Beckenstein recalls, "a lot of the jazz purists got on our case about calling what we did jazz and now it's funny to hear us getting respect from the same people. Like, wow, what you guys did was so much more intriguing than some of the stuff they hear today…
Art manifests itself in a multitude of styles and contexts. Isn't that why we started to play in the first place?"
In
1977, they foreshadowed the
DIY movement of the punks of the
1970’s by self-releasing their eponymous debut album. Spyro Gyra was picked up by
Amherst Records, a local label who then made a deal for subsequent albums to go to
Infinity Records, a label owned by
MCA Records. My channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/cherrymansata
- published: 29 Sep 2015
- views: 2391