My Vinyl Collection 162
Spyro Gyra, Squeeze (6), Jess Stacy, Stampfel & Weber. Music history from my shelves. 33 rpm, Vinyl.
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1131. Spyro Gyra, Morning Dance (1979)
Bandleader Jay Beckenstein (b.1951) grew up on Long Island listening to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie. His mother was an opera singer and his father loved jazz. Little Jay was turned over to the piano to play at five and given a sax to blow at seven. He’s still out there, still the leader of Spyra Gyro, the band he formed in 1974 in what might seem to be an unlikely place for jazz to thrive — Buffalo, New York.
Beckenstein was a student at the University at Buffalo, a biology major, when he found his calling. At the Statler Hotel bar, where Sunday workshops featured real pros with real experience, Helen Hume, Vic Dickenson, Herb Hall, Buddy Tate, and a place where he could play the next night at an open Monday jam. Buffalo, too, was then on everybody’s tour, Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, George Benson, Nancy Wilson, George Shearing, Frank Sinatra, Della Reese.
Beckenstein remembers, “Buffalo was like a mini-Chicago back then, with a smoking blues, soul, jazz, even a rockabilly scene. I was in the horn sections around town, backing some great vocalists.”
Spyro Gyra was born in a Tuesday night jam. Mainstream fusion, reflecting a crossroads, never fussy or overproduced, easy listening and a challenge at the same time. More than 10,000 live shows across the world and back. Thirty-five albums. Bookings still roll in; and Beckenstein always makes room for the summer jazz festival out front of the Colored Musicians’ Club (from 1917) in downtown Buffalo.
1132. Squeeze, Six Squeeze Songs Crammed Into One 10-inch Record (1979)
1133. ———-, Argy Bargy (1980)
1134. ———-, Eastside Story (1981)
1135. ———-, Sweets From a Stranger (1982)
1136. ———-, Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti (1985)
1137. ———-, Babylon and On (1987)
UK New Wave rockers who had a moment in the sun. Brit pop in the eighties. Over 400 bands are listed as New Wave, defined by the listers as a “lighter and more melodic” than punk; a "broadening” of the base. Power pop, synth-pop, alt-dance; Sex Pistols Suck!
Squeeze is the broadest of the base, humorous with jerky rhythms, leaping hurdles on style and format, electronically innovative inside a keen fashion that caught on and was pushed on TV by the new music videos. Bands in the USA were still not making videos so the new music channel MTV was happy to play the Brit bands on their loops.
Squeeze was formed in 1974 by teenage friends Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook in South London. They were amazed when somebody dubbed them “the new Lennon and McCartney.” After 50 years they are still hitting the boards with style, with lip. Difford and Tilbrook are the two around which a changing cast of band members revolve, as Squeeze continues to receive critical acclaim and tour, tour, tour.
With the albums Argybargy and the Elvis Costello-produced East Side Story, Squeeze caught a bit of a breezy run the eighties in America, but since has never proven particularly popular in the States.
Not so in the UK, as seen in the sold out, two-night stand benefitting the Teenage Cancer Trust with The Who at London’s Royal Albert Hall this month. Another 40 odd concerts are lined up across the UK starting in the summer.
1138. Jess Stacy and Friends, Piano Solos 1938-44 (1988)
Stacy (b.1904) caught a break early. His neighbor in 1912 gave a piano to his hard-scrabbling family in Blue Point, Mo. In
1938, he performed a memorable solo in Carnegie Hall as a member of Benny Goodman’s orchestra.
Otherwise, his career was that of a well-appointed pianist in the rhythm section — starting in the early1920s on Mississippi riverboats; with Joe Kayser's band in Capone’s Chicago; with trumpet player Paul Mares at Harry's Bar; with guitarist Eddie Condon. In 1936, Stacy joined Goodman.
His Carnegie hall triumph came at the end of an historic Goodman concert on the song "Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)." Benny took his usual solo on the clarinet then turned and surprised his yeoman piano man by giving him an unrehearsed nod. Stacy responded. One critic called his solo “a graceful, impressionistic marvel with classical flourishes, yet that still managed to swing. It was the best thing he ever did, and it's ironic that such a layered, nuanced performance came at the end of such a chaotic, bombastic tune."
By the late 1940’s, Stacy was doing the West Coast bars and clubs including the Brown Derby, the Hangover and the Ile de France. He toured the scene, wherever he could get a job, and retired from music in 1963. Stacy went to work for the Max Factor company, then made a piano comeback with a final appearance at the 1974 Newport Jazz Festival. He died in 1995 in L.A. at age 90.
1139. Stampfel & Weber, Going Nowhere Fast (1981)
Fiddle and banjo player Peter Stampfel and country-blues guitarist Steve Weber met each other in May 1963 and found common ground in their love for jug bands and the Anthology of American Folk Music, the collection of vinyl discs that introduced old-time folk music to a new generation Greenwich Village.
Stampfel took the approach, “What if Charlie Poole, and Charley Patton, and Uncle Dave Macon and all those guys were magically transported from the late 1920s to 1963? And they were exposed to contemporary rock and roll? What would they do? I began to change the words. I made up new words because it was easier than listening to the tape and writing words down.”
Thus Stampfel and Weber formed the Holy Modal Rounders, an empire that was neither holy, nor modal, nor round.
Sam Shepard was the drummer in the Rounders. “People were dumbfounded by the Rounders. They couldn’t figure us out, but they must have liked something about us because they kept hiring us.” Folksinger Dave Van Ronk puts things in context, “They were stoned out their birds all the time; everybody knew it and they made no bones about it.”
Weber and Stampfel last played the Bottom Line in New York in 1996. Weber failed to show at a 40th-anniversary show in 2003. He died in 2020 in West Virginia. He was 76.
Stampfel continues on, his latest work a 100-song, 5-CD collection ala Harry Smith called Peter Stampfel’s 20th Century in 100 Songs in 2021. He’s 85 and lives in the Village.