SPYRO GYRA
50th Anniversary
with Special Guest Jeff Lorber Fusion
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Spyro Gyra
You might think that Spyro Gyra’s leader and saxophonist Jay Beckenstein might welcome a break in its 45+ years of non-stop, year round performances. After all, much of his adult life has been centered around the recording and performing activities of this now legendary group. Renowned bass player Will Lee once referred to the ensemble as a “well oiled road machine” as a tribute to their daunting schedule, bringing their music to fans around the globe. So what has it been like to have this well oiled road machine in the garage due to the pandemic? “Good!” Beckenstein laughingly replies, “A little more oil couldn’t hurt. But you know, it’s too long now. The first few months of it, after over 45 years of touring without really having a break, it felt good to not be touring. Even if it was to realize how much I love being out there. But now, It’s been too long.”
Fans of the band are familiar with the group’s rise to international prominence from humble beginnings in Buffalo, New York. That’s when a few area working musicians arranged for a weekly gig of playing less commercial music in a local club on everyone’s night off. So humble a beginning, there was no name for the band so they were only known as “Tuesday Night Jazz Jam”. Soon the word got around and the core group was joined by many of the city’s musicians to come and have some fun. And customers started showing up, too, prompting the club owner to press Beckenstein for a band name for the club’s new sign. Beckenstein offered up this late night, tipsy answer, “You can call it ‘spirogyra’”, an algae that he had studied once. The next week, he came back and there it was, misspelling and all, and so it began in 1974.
Fast forward to the band having logged over 10,000 shows on six continents, having released 35 albums garnering platinum and gold records along the way and here they are, once again looking forward. Speaking of the band’s return to live audiences, Beckenstein admits, “It’s been a long time since we played. We’ll do some fan favorites but we’re a bunch of wanderers by nature.
We have a relatively short attention span as a band and we always will want to be doing our favorites too. That’s all I know right now. But it will be happy. We will be happy.”
Regarding the pandemic that forced this hiatus, Beckenstein admits, “It made me appreciate my previous social world. So much of my previous social world was the band. Because we’re geographically distant from each other, it has been a very hard time being apart. If the pandemic has done anything, it’s made me appreciate how much the band had become my family.”
Speaking of his long time collaborator keyboardist Tom Schuman, he describes him as “the most underestimated musician I have ever known. The guy is a musical genius. You know, that term gets thrown around a lot but he’s the real deal. And that’s been matched over the years with his great motivation, great attention to detail and an incredible work ethic. Then there’s this complete musical fluidity that you can only call genius.” Prompted to capsulize the rest of this musical family, guitarist Julio Fernandez is “Mr. Esprit”, the guy who brings spirit to the band, the guy who imbues just about every note he plays with pure emotion. When he plays, I really feel it.” Bassist Scott Ambush is “an amazing musician and technician. He is the person in the band who is always encouraging us to push the envelope.” Drummer Lionel Cordew “is the engine that always works. Lionel is the backbone of the band as we all rely on him providing us rock solid structure for us to play on.”
These are they musicians responsible for the latest release from the band, Vinyl Tap, a collection of mostly Classic Rock covers, the promotion of which was cut short by the health crisis. “I see Vinyl Tap as being a bit of a one off,” Beckenstein observed. “I’m very proud of Vinyl Tap. I think we did a really nice job on interpretations. Everybody played great but as I said I think it’s a one off. It was really great fun doing other peoples’ material but that ultimately is not how I identify Spyro Gyra. Ultimately, we’re a band that writes its own material.” Beckenstein further describes
their approach, “First of all, it’s instrumental. That covers a lot of ground right there. The music has elements of Jazz, rhythm and blues, Latin music and world music. It’s instrumental, it’s improvisational, there’s a lot of teamwork in the band and the music is really honest and coming from us and what we want to say. Jazz is a chain of generations, where one generation goes to the next generation and goes to the next generation. That’s really all a Jazz musician can aspire to, to be a link in that chain of the Jazz tradition and that people after him used that as a link for their link. We came along imbuing Jazz with other musical styles, one of the first but not the first. But it wasn’t that new. Dizzy Gillespie had done Latin music and Brazilian music was being done by Stan Getz. The idea of getting away from traditional mainstream Jazz by combining it with other things was already alive and well. I believe we were very much in the tradition.”
With respect to the long term future for a band with a 50th anniversary not too far off, Beckenstein allows, “As long as I can perform at a high-level, I would never think of retiring. But I can’t tell you what it would be like if I was to have to continue as a lesser version of myself. Thankfully, that hasn’t happened yet. So all I am thinking about right now is that I can’t wait to see the people again.”
Jeff LorberGrammy Award-winning keyboardistcomposer-producer Jeff Lorber has, over the course of 42 years and 24 albums, pioneered the post-fusion sound of contemporary jazz with his radio-friendly, groove-oriented instrumental music. From 1977’s Jeff Lorber Fusion to 2017’s Prototype, named Best Contemporary Instrumental Music album at the 60th annual Grammy Awards, to his recent collaboration with guitar great Mike Stern on Eleven, Lorber has shown a knack for creating fresh vibes and funky grooves while layering on jazzy improvisations on piano, synthesizer and his signature Fender Rhodes electric piano.
An acknowledged pioneer of what would later become known as “smooth jazz” and
“urban jazz,” Lorber has woven together elements of funk, R&B, rock and electric jazz into an appealing hybrid that has consistently won over listeners from coast to coast and resulted in several #1 radio hits. A member of the all-star group Jazz Funk Soul, featuring saxophonist Everette Harp and guitarist Paul Jackson Jr., Lorber has also headlined The Smooth Jazz Cruise, dubbed “The Greatest Party at Sea.”
Growing up in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Cheltenham, where he attended the same high school as Randy and Michael Brecker, pianist Marc Copland, saxophonist Andy Snitzer and baseball player Reggie Jackson, Lorber began playing the piano at the age of four and as a teen performed with a variety of local R&B bands. While attending the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Lorber developed an enduring love of jazz. “I was very lucky that I ended up at Berklee, and what I learned about harmony, improvisation and arranging there is the backbone for how I approach music,” he explained in a Berklee alumni profile. “Besides the music education, I found that hanging out with all the talented musicians and finding out what they were listening to was just as valuable. I was lucky to meet and play with John Scofield, who was already an incredible guitar player, and keyboardist Greg Hawkes, who went on to great success with the Cars.”
During his time at Berklee, Lorber also studied with the renowned piano teacher Madame Margaret Chaloff, whose other students included Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Hal Galper and Kenny Werner. “Along with studying the history of jazz piano, and jazz music in general, I was very influenced by both Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea,” he added. “I was also a big fan of Horace Silver, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Wynton Kelly and Red Garland, and I really admired what Weather Report was doing.”
After graduating from Berklee in 1971, Lorber moved to Portland, Oregon, where he combined his love of jazz and funky R&B (Tower of Power, The Crusaders, Earth, Wind & Fire) into a potent band he named Jeff Lorber Fusion. The group’s combination of
complex harmonies and infectious grooves quickly established them as a popular attraction in the Pacific Northwest, and by 1975 they began touring nationally. With the release of its 1977 self-titled debut, Jeff Lorber Fusion was well on its way. Their 1978 followup album, Soft Space, featured special guests Chick Corea and Joe Farrell while their 1980 release, Wizard Island, included a well-regarded local tenor sax player named Kenny Gorelick, who would later emerge as a solo artist in his own right known as Kenny G. Lorber struck New Adult Contemporary gold with 1986’s Private Passion, which prominently featured R&B vocalists along with renowned jazz soloists in trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and guitarist Larry Carlton. For the remainder of the ‘80s, Lorber took a break as bandleader and solo artist to concentrate on session work and producing other artists. “I switched gears and became an in-demand session player for R&B and pop music,” he recalled. “I was very lucky to work on a number of successful projects for DeBarge, U2, Paula Abdul and a number of artists produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Charlie Wilson, and the Isley Brothers.”
After a seven-year layoff, Lorber returned with 1993’s Worth Waiting For, a tongue-in-cheek titled album for an all-star project featuring special guests Art Porter, Gary Meek, Dave Koz, Lee Ritenour, Janis Siegel and Bruce Hornsby. “This was a real explosion of bottled up musical ideas,” he said. “That record helped re-ignite my career as an artist.” He recorded for Verve and Zebra through the ‘90s before moving to the Narada label and subsequently releasing 2001’s Kickin’ It, 2003’s Philly Style and 2005’s Flipside. His 2007 Blue Note release, He Had a Hat, found the pianist shifting from funky pop-jazz numbers to more straight ahead swingers like “Be Bops” and “All Most Blues” and the hard-hitting fusion number “Surreptitious,” featuring trumpeter Randy Brecker. Lorber returned to ‘70s flavored funk and soul on 2010’s Now Is the Time and with 2011’s Galaxian he began a working relationship with bass-producer Jimmy Haslip, a charter
member of the Yellowjackets. Together they had a string of successes with Hacienda, Step It Up, Grammy-winning Prototype and Impact. They remain a solid co-producing team on Eleven, Lorber’s recent collaboration with Mike Stern.
“I was very enthusiastic about this project with Mike because I knew it would be something different and challenging,” says Lorber. “And I liked the idea that it would take me away from what some people call ‘smooth jazz,’ which is a monicker that I don’t really love. Because Mike is not that at all. He’s a lot jazzier in terms of his phrasing. He’s just a bebop wizard, he’s got an incredible jazz feeling. And by the same token, he’s got the rock and blues thing covered too. He’s on both sides of the musical spectrum. So when I heard he was up for it, I was delighted to have a chance to work with him in the studio on this project. And I think we really hit it off musically as well as personally.”
Roughly the same age — Lorber was born November 4, 1952 in Philadelphia, Stern was born January 10, 1953 in Boston — these two musical forces grew up admiring a lot of the same music, from Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis to Weather Report and Joe Henderson. You can hear that common ground on Eleven, as both Lorber and Stern throw down with a vengeance. From the melodic and catchy opener, “Righteous,” powered by Gary Novak’s crisp backbeat, Lorber’s signature Fender Rhodes playing and Dave Mann’s tight, East Coast/Brecker Brothers-ish horn arrangement, to Stern’s lyrical, African flavored “Nu Som” and his tender ballad “Tell Me,” to nasty, blues-drenched jams like “Jones Street” and “Slow Change,” this summit meeting percolates with insistent grooves and pulsates with energy and ideas.
“This project was a joy to work on for many reasons but I most enjoyed the collaborative effort in this work with Jeff and Mike,” said Haslip. “For me, as a co-producer, it was the kind of creative and experimental experience I look forward to. We did try to shake it up, and I think we really succeeded.”
Spyro Gyra 50th Anniversary with Special Guest Jeff Lorber Fusion
