Spyro Gyra
In 2024, Jay Beckenstein and Spyro Gyra celebrated 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 for the band. 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.
Ticket Link: https://www.lyrictheatre.com/show/11688-spyro-gyra
