Jay Beckenstein
I was born May 14, 1951 in Brooklyn, NY and grew up surrounded by music.
My mother was an opera singer and my father’s love of jazz introduced me to Charlie Parker and Lester Young before I could speak. I started piano at the age of five when my family moved to Farmingdale, LI. I was given my first saxophone through the music program in elementary school at age seven.
Jay_2806From there I took saxophone lessons, and played in school bands up to my senior year of high school. At that point I met Jeremy Wall and we started my first band. My senior year of high school was spent in Nurnberg, Germany where my father was working and I went to school on a U.S. Army Base. I played in R&B bands there that performed both for the Army and in German clubs. By then, I had been introduced to a lot of R&B and rock and started to mix those concepts together with my jazz base.
I returned to the States and enrolled at State University of New York at Buffalo. People in Buffalo just call it UB. I studied a good deal of classical and avant garde music in the music program there and played in some interesting avant garde ensembles. I studied saxophone in school with Edward Yadzinski, but I also studied outside with John Sadola who worked on my jazz technique. I was also fortunate around this time to meet Phil DiRe, a great tenor player from Buffalo, who was putting together the Buffalo Jazz Ensemble. Working with Phil in that group led to other collaborations which greatly expanded my perspective.
By my junior year in college, I had started working in the clubs in Buffalo and by the time I graduated I had steady work in the clubs. The next few years was spent playing in some great blues and R&B bands. It was at this time that I met Phil Brennan, another student at UB, who was to later become Spyro Gyra’s longtime manager. Buffalo had a booming music scene at the time, but after awhile I wanted to do something other than be a sideman. I then started doing some off night instrumental sessions in small clubs with Jeremy Wall. This work slowly (over a year) evolved into the band Spyro Gyra. In the band’s second year, Tom Schuman joined the band and started to share the keyboards with Jeremy. Tom has been the sole keyboardist since 1978.
Around 1976, I went into business with Rich Calandra, a local drummer who had aspirations to be a record producer. The two of us produced a number of local acts and, when there was studio time left over, we would record Spyro Gyra. The band’s first album slowly came together in this way.
Rich and I met with little success with our efforts with other groups, so we pressed 500 LP’s of Spyro Gyra on our own label with what little money we had left,. Within a year we had sold tens of thousands of records, signed a record deal and launched the band’s career. In 1978 Phil Brennan, who had been an informal business advisor during the recording of that first record, made it official and started working with me. In 1979, I moved to NYC to produce Morning Dance and lived there for four years. Catching the Sun, Carnaval and Freetime were also recorded during this time. My life was consumed with touring around the world, recording and writing.
Rich and I then purchased a turn-of-the-century stone farmhouse just outside of NYC and converted it into my own recording studio, BearTracks. This provided Spyro Gyra with a great recording environment. The studio stayed active for more than thirty years, eventually closing at the end of 2005.
Though I occasionally have recorded on records other than Spyro Gyra and have done other productions, (Dave Samuels and Tom Schuman), Spyro Gyra has been my main focus and has fulfilled most of my musical dreams. It has been over forty years of great music, great friendship and great times.
The rest of my life is filled with my love for painting, gardening, hiking and all things outdoors but most of all with my daughters Claire and Isabel and my son Alex. They, more than anyone or anything else, have brought me inspiration and contentedness.
