Sportsmen's Tavern

Sunday Sept. 20, 2015

Spyro Gyra

$45 adv. $50 dos

4 pm doors, 6 pm show


www.spyrogyra.com

Blurb

Spyro Gyra is a jazz juggernaut who released their 30th album of new material The Rhinebeck Sessions in 2013, which Jazztimes called "inspired". Travis Rogers of the Jazz Journalists Association picked it for Jazz Album Of The Year. Something Else Reviews called it "Their finest album since their early 80s heyday" and made it a TopTwenty pick for the year. George Harris of the Jazz Weekly enthused, "I gotta tell ya, these guys still sound GREAT." Not bad for a band observing its 40th anniversary in 2014.

Theirs is an unlikely story of a group with humble beginnings in Buffalo, NY who has continued to reach an international audience over nearly forty years, resulting in sales of over 10 million albums and having played over five thousand shows on five continents.

They have accomplished this due to a forward looking approach combined with the work ethic of an underdog, always challenging themselves to do something new while never resting on past success. It has proven to be a recipe for longevity for this jazz group while music has gone in and out of styles in ever shorter cycles. 2014 marks forty years from their start in a Buffalo club where they were first known as "Tuesday Night - Jazz Jam."

"My hope is that our music has the same effect on the audience that it does on me," says group leader Jay Beckenstein. "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 that reminds them of 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."

Profile

As Spyro Gyra contemplates upcoming milestones to its storied career, it is tempting to fall back on the Grateful Dead lyric, "What a long strange trip it¹s been." How many bands in instrumental jazz or any music, for that matter, can boast a 40-year career, gaining and keeping fans over almost four decades? When Spyro Gyra formed in 1974 in Buffalo, New York, the pop charts included names like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Grand Funk Railroad, the Carpenters, Bob Marley & The Wailers and Pink Floyd. Very few groups can claim this kind of longevity. Yet Spyro Gyra shows no sign of slowing down, having garnered Grammy® nominations for four consecutive albums in the last ten years while touring worldwide year-round.

Since those early days, Spyro Gyra have performed over five thousand shows, released thirty albums (not counting three compilations), and sold over 10 MILLION albums while also achieving one RIAA-certified Platinum and two Gold albums.

Add to that legacy The Rhinebeck Sessions, the band's 30th album and its first ever album written in the studio over the course of three days of improvised sessions. 2014 marks 40 years since the band's founding and also the 35th anniversary of Morning Dance, an occasion for which the band will perform that album in its entirety worldwide at select concerts in 2014.

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). The thriving Buffalo music scene soon offered new avenues of rock, soul and blues to explore.

"Not many people know it, but Buffalo was like a mini Chicago back then, with a smoking blues, soul, jazz, even rockabilly scene, of all things," Beckenstein muses. "After being confined to classical music for so long, it was heaven. I was in the horn sections around town, backing some great vocalists."

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 weren¹t playing other gigs to pay their bills. Around this time, a young 16-year-old keyboardist named Tom Schuman began sitting in. Schuman went on to play on the debut album and remains a member of Spyro Gyra to this day, having just passed his 35 year mark as a full time member.

"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 group¹s 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.' The club owner misspelled it, and here we are thirty years later. In retrospect, it¹s 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 Weather Report 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 coupled with a production-centric recording process, characterized by a rotating cast of characters in the studio including Randy Brecker, Michael Brecker, Bob Malach, Steve Gadd, Steve Jordan, Hiram Bullock, Eddie Gomez, Will Lee, Marcus Miller, Dave Samuels, Manolo Badrena, and many others. In 1983, Beckenstein made the decision to make the band's albums a reflection of the live show and to showcase the work of his core band members he shared the stage with night after night, only supplementing with occasional guests.

In addition to the aforementioned Schuman, the band lineup has remained very stable for the second act of their career. Julio Fernandez became the group's guitarist in 1984 and 2014 will mark thirty years as Spyro Gyra's guitarist. From 1983 through the mid-90s, vibraphonist Dave Samuels was a core member of Spyro Gyra. Scott Ambush became the band's bass player in 1992, while drummer Lee Pearson joined on drums in 2011.

"When we first started," Beckenstein recalls, "a lot of the jazz purists got on our case about calling what we did jazz. Now it's funny to hear us getting respect from the same people. Art manifests itself in a multitude of styles and contexts. Isn't that why we started to play music in the first place?"

In 1977, Beckenstein and Spyro Gyra foreshadowed the DIY punk rock movement by self-releasing their eponymous debut album. Spyro Gyra was picked up by Amherst Records, a local Buffalo, NY label, who then made a deal for subsequent albums to go by released through Infinity Records, a label owned by MCA Records. After netting Infinity its only gold (soon to be platinum) record with 1979's Morning Dance, Infinity folded and the group was picked up by MCA Records. There they stayed until MCA acquired noted contemporary jazz label GRP Records. Spyro Gyra moved to GRP in 1990 and put out all but one of their 1990¹s output on that label. In 1999, they released a single album, Got The Magic with special guest vocalist Basia on Windham Hill Jazz.

The early 2000s saw the band returning to indie mode, licensing their albums to Heads Up International. Most of the Heads Up album masters have returned to the band as independent self-releases, which they continue to sell through their site, on tour and wherever music is sold. In 2011, Spyro Gyra returned to their old label, Amherst Records to release A Foreign Affair. 2013's The Rhinebeck Sessions is the band's first fully independent release since their 1977 debut.

"My hope is that our music has the same effect on the audience that it does on me," says Beckenstein. "I¹ve 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 that reminds them of something much bigger than themselves, there's this beauty in music that's not connected to sentences. It¹s very transportive. I would hope that when people hear our music or come to see us, they're able to share that feeling with us. That's the truly glorious part of being a musician."

SPYRO GYRA WRITES AND RECORDS NEW ALBUM IN MARATHON RECORDING SESSION

As Spyro Gyra contemplates upcoming milestones to its storied career, it is tempting to fall back on the Grateful Dead lyric, "What a long strange trip it’s been." How many bands in instrumental jazz or any kind of music, can boast a 40-year career, gaining and keeping fans over almost four decades? When Spyro Gyra formed in 1974 in Buffalo, New York, the pop charts included names like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Grand Funk Railroad, The Carpenters, Bob Marley & The Wailers and Pink Floyd. Very few groups can claim this kind of longevity. Yet Spyro Gyra shows no sign of slowing down, having garnered Grammy® nominations for four consecutive albums in the last ten years while touring worldwide year-round.

Add to that legacy The Rhinebeck Sessions, the band's 30th album and its first to be written entirely in the studio over the course of just three days. In the early days of April 2013, founder and saxophonist Jay Beckenstein and the members of Spyro Gyra entered a recording studio in Rhinebeck, NY, a small town in the Hudson Valley not far from Woodstock. Beckenstein and his bandmates set out to do something that they had never done before in their nearly forty year history – improvise with each other over three days and in the process write and record an entire new album.

“As I thought about doing another record, I asked myself, what is it that makes Spyro Gyra so special?” Beckenstein explains, “I decided that it was the fact that we have been together so long that the communication between us has become almost mystical. Our ability to improvise on the fly has become so strong because we have played together so much. It was time to go into the studio with very little planned and see what might come out of it.”

What came is The Rhinebeck Sessions, a collection of mostly uptempo, often funky pieces that stands toe to toe with the best of this group’s prolific output. Adding a further dimension to the story, The Rhinebeck Sessions is the band's first fully independent release since their 1977 eponymous debut.

Beckenstein concedes, “It was a bit of a gamble but we’re lucky to have a loyal fan base whom we feel are probably going to be interested in whatever we’re doing. I was also fairly confident that whatever came out of it would be pretty close to the way we have approached our live shows for years.”

And different it is. Starting with the eight-minute plus opener “Serious Delivery,” the album cascades through bebop lines alongside rocking almost jam-band-like grooves. “We didn’t set out with an eight minute tune just to make a statement, but that wouldn’t have happened in our previous way of making records. Normally, you wouldn’t want to lead a record with a tune that long, no matter how good it is. But we decided that we weren’t going to be afraid to do it either.”

The resulting collectively composed tunes clearly demonstrate what the group’s fan base already knows – that Spyro Gyra can play just about any sound and are not shy about delivering virtuosic performances.

Beckenstein explains his feelings on much music produced today and how The Rhinebeck Sessions represent a departure from that. “Music has come to a place where it’s overproduced, oversampled, overlooped. The coolest thing about jazz is improvising as you go. That’s the antithesis of where music has tended to go these days. So in that sense, the title is very retro, reflecting the music. It harkens back to the ideals of the past. It tells a simple story of what went on here.”

“Some of these tunes started with nothing more than a beat. Maybe [bassist] Scott [Ambush] would come up with a phrase and maybe [drummer] Lee [Pearson] would start something, or Julio [Fernandez] or anyone else. With a few of these tunes, there wasn’t a single word uttered before the first note was played. Other tunes came from an idea brought by a band member, some more developed than others, but after that we were all open to taking it to where we, as a band, wanted it to go. Those ideas were always intended to be starting points and they were.”

Beckenstein addresses the business end of financing and releasing one’s own album independently. “I think the time has come in the music industry for artists to take control of their music. With the revolutions in the digital distribution of music, you don’t need as much of the machinery of the major record companies that you once did. There is still a world where you need a big record company machine to maximize what you do. But in the more modest confines of selling jazz records, there’s so much that you can do without that big machine.”

“When it’s your own money at risk, there is a temptation to make a more conventionally commercial record. That didn’t happen with this record. It sounds like us because we did it for ourselves. This is a very personal record. On the other hand, because you’re more aware of the money being spent, there’s an incentive to get it done, say what you’ve got to say and wrap it up. I think we did that here.”