Spyro Gyra
Spyro Gyra
(September 7, 2024 at 7pm)
In 2024, Jay Beckenstein and Spyro Gyra are observing the 50th anniversary of what started as a diversion, something that was just for fun and 25 cents at the door. It began inauspiciously
when Beckenstein and some musician friends in Buffalo, New York, organized a get-together on
their shared night off from working in bands that actually made money. He and childhood
friend Jeremy Walls called those evenings Tuesday Night Jazz Jams. Saxophone player
Beckenstein was a biology major at the University of Buffalo before switching to music
performance, and one biology lesson stuck: he remembered a freshwater green alga with spiral
bands of chloroplasts. When their popularity rose and they added a high-schooler named Tom
Schuman to join them, club owners insisted on a real name. Beckenstein remembered that
biology lesson and called the group Spyro Gyra. “It began as a joke,” Beckenstein said some
years ago. “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.”
Beckenstein loved playing in clubs around Buffalo in the 1970s. The Long Island-born musician
grew up listening to the music of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy
Gillespie. “Not many people know it, but Buffalo was like a mini-Chicago then, with a smoking
blues, soul, jazz, even rockabilly scene, of all things,” he said. “After being confined to classical
music for so long, it was heaven. I was in the horn section around town, backing some great
vocalists.”
The band developed such a good reputation in Buffalo that they began to get local airplay.
Beckenstein decided to capitalize on it by pressing 500 records himself and selling them out of
the trunk of his car in Buffalo, Cleveland and Rochester. They did a commercial and began
selling more and more. “When I listen to that recording, I hear seeds of the music that made us
popular,” Beckenstein said. “It was pretty innovative at the time, I guess, a strange but still
accessible blend of jazz, R&B and even Caribbean music. It’s funny how people didn’t know
what to make of it and now it’s so ubiquitous.”
Beckenstein and Spyro Gyra wanted to push the jazz envelope and they received some flak over
it. “When we first started, 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,” he said. 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?”
At the end of 2019, Spyro Gyra released a new album, Vinyl Tap, the first album of new material
in six years. It’s full of surprises, like a Latin big band take on Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” a
stunning arrangement of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” and a bluesy, slowed-down
version of Squeeze’s “Tempted.” It took risks that paid off.
Art Good, the host of the Jazztrax radio show, sent the group’s manager a note: “When I saw
that Spyro had done an album of covers, I cringed,” he wrote. “Then I was terrified to begin
listening. Then I listened. Now, I can’t stop listening. Jay and the guys have pulled off an
incredible feat, an entire album of incredible ‘coverings’ of great songs instrumentally.
Everyone’s taking off on their different instrument solos is captivating, Drum solos aren’t ‘drum
solos’ here. Bass solos aren’t just ‘bass solos’ here. Because of Spyro’s distinctive players, what
normally would be just bass and drum solos just further define these incredible classic rock
songs. This album is positively fabulous.”
Now, 50 years in, Spyro Gyra has performed more than 10,000 concerts on six continents,
released more than 30 albums, and sold more than 10 million of them. They have gathered gold
and platinum along the way. The band of humble beginnings in Buffalo, New York, could rest on
its laurels, but that’s not Spyro Gyra. Beckenstein and his pals are still having too much fun and
touching audiences.
“My hope is that our music has the same effect on the audience as it does on me. I’ve always
felt that music, and particularly instrumental music, has this non-literal quality that lets people
travel to a place where there are no words. Whether it’s touching their emotions or connecting
them to something much bigger than themselves, there’s this beauty in music that’s not
connected to sentences. It’s very transportive. I would hope that when people hear our music
or come to see us, they’re able to share that with us. That’s the truly glorious part of being a
musician.”
When asked about the prospect of retiring, Beckenstein demurs. “Hey, I think about it, but I got
a taste of it during the height of the Covid pandemic and I didn’t like it,” he said. “I didn’t like it
at all. It gave me a slight feeling of being purposeless. On the road, there are many times when
getting from Point A to Point B is painful, and I might wind up muttering under my breath, ‘Why
am I doing this?’ There’s no question when I ‘m not doing it, it can feel like there’s no reason for
me to be around, so I’m in it for as long as I can do it.”
So are we.
(September 7, 2024 at 7pm)
In 2024, Jay Beckenstein and Spyro Gyra are observing the 50th anniversary of what started as a diversion, something that was just for fun and 25 cents at the door. It began inauspiciously
when Beckenstein and some musician friends in Buffalo, New York, organized a get-together on
their shared night off from working in bands that actually made money. He and childhood
friend Jeremy Walls called those evenings Tuesday Night Jazz Jams. Saxophone player
Beckenstein was a biology major at the University of Buffalo before switching to music
performance, and one biology lesson stuck: he remembered a freshwater green alga with spiral
bands of chloroplasts. When their popularity rose and they added a high-schooler named Tom
Schuman to join them, club owners insisted on a real name. Beckenstein remembered that
biology lesson and called the group Spyro Gyra. “It began as a joke,” Beckenstein said some
years ago. “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.”
Beckenstein loved playing in clubs around Buffalo in the 1970s. The Long Island-born musician
grew up listening to the music of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy
Gillespie. “Not many people know it, but Buffalo was like a mini-Chicago then, with a smoking
blues, soul, jazz, even rockabilly scene, of all things,” he said. “After being confined to classical
music for so long, it was heaven. I was in the horn section around town, backing some great
vocalists.”
The band developed such a good reputation in Buffalo that they began to get local airplay.
Beckenstein decided to capitalize on it by pressing 500 records himself and selling them out of
the trunk of his car in Buffalo, Cleveland and Rochester. They did a commercial and began
selling more and more. “When I listen to that recording, I hear seeds of the music that made us
popular,” Beckenstein said. “It was pretty innovative at the time, I guess, a strange but still
accessible blend of jazz, R&B and even Caribbean music. It’s funny how people didn’t know
what to make of it and now it’s so ubiquitous.”
Beckenstein and Spyro Gyra wanted to push the jazz envelope and they received some flak over
it. “When we first started, 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,” he said. 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?”
At the end of 2019, Spyro Gyra released a new album, Vinyl Tap, the first album of new material
in six years. It’s full of surprises, like a Latin big band take on Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” a
stunning arrangement of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home” and a bluesy, slowed-down
version of Squeeze’s “Tempted.” It took risks that paid off.
Art Good, the host of the Jazztrax radio show, sent the group’s manager a note: “When I saw
that Spyro had done an album of covers, I cringed,” he wrote. “Then I was terrified to begin
listening. Then I listened. Now, I can’t stop listening. Jay and the guys have pulled off an
incredible feat, an entire album of incredible ‘coverings’ of great songs instrumentally.
Everyone’s taking off on their different instrument solos is captivating, Drum solos aren’t ‘drum
solos’ here. Bass solos aren’t just ‘bass solos’ here. Because of Spyro’s distinctive players, what
normally would be just bass and drum solos just further define these incredible classic rock
songs. This album is positively fabulous.”
Now, 50 years in, Spyro Gyra has performed more than 10,000 concerts on six continents,
released more than 30 albums, and sold more than 10 million of them. They have gathered gold
and platinum along the way. The band of humble beginnings in Buffalo, New York, could rest on
its laurels, but that’s not Spyro Gyra. Beckenstein and his pals are still having too much fun and
touching audiences.
“My hope is that our music has the same effect on the audience as it does on me. I’ve always
felt that music, and particularly instrumental music, has this non-literal quality that lets people
travel to a place where there are no words. Whether it’s touching their emotions or connecting
them to something much bigger than themselves, there’s this beauty in music that’s not
connected to sentences. It’s very transportive. I would hope that when people hear our music
or come to see us, they’re able to share that with us. That’s the truly glorious part of being a
musician.”
When asked about the prospect of retiring, Beckenstein demurs. “Hey, I think about it, but I got
a taste of it during the height of the Covid pandemic and I didn’t like it,” he said. “I didn’t like it
at all. It gave me a slight feeling of being purposeless. On the road, there are many times when
getting from Point A to Point B is painful, and I might wind up muttering under my breath, ‘Why
am I doing this?’ There’s no question when I ‘m not doing it, it can feel like there’s no reason for
me to be around, so I’m in it for as long as I can do it.”
So are we.
