All That’s Jazz

Leave the word alone, why don't ya?

For decades, "jazz" never needed constrictive modifiers until category-crazed taste-makers -- yes, that's you, music critics, record execs, radio programmers and demographic savants -- decided the term looked lonely and mandated qualifiers like "fusion," "smooth" and "contemporary" as acoustic approaches branched off into electronic experimentation.

Such is the marketer's impulse to label and limit while packaging the product, matched by the artist's instinct to resist and rebel while making the music.

"I hate the smooth jazz label," says alto saxophonist Jay Beckenstein, founding bandleader of Spyro Gyra, which opens the annual Jazz in the Park series -- just "jazz," no extraneous add-ons -- Saturday at the Clark County Government Center.

"We chuckle when we hear we were some kind of progenitor of smooth jazz, because initially, the smooth jazz stations wouldn't play us," says Beckenstein, whose band -- which over the years cultivated a large, loyal fan base and produced platinum/gold-selling albums galore -- includes a pair of Las Vegans, keyboardist Tom Schuman and percussionist Bonny B.

"We existed 10 years before that label came about, and then we had the hardest time getting on those stations. They were rejecting anything with solos in it. You're supposed to play in some predetermined box, but not being in the box has given us so much freedom. From the beginning, we were hybridizing jazz with whatever the heck we pleased, sometimes tilting Latin, sometimes calypso, sometimes straight-ahead jazz."

Assigning a signature sound to Spyro Gyra trivializes the group's range, but hit tunes are enduring reference points, and 1979's tropical-tinged "Morning Dance" is its wide-appeal calling card. With its loping Caribbean rhythms and Schuman's steel drum-mimicking keyboard trills breaking like a wave toward Beckenstein's carefree sax riffs, "Morning Dance" is a song of the sun gently prodding you out of slumber and into its warm embrace. And when a rain shower of synthesizer chords clears the path for a jaunty guitar-walk, you're on a breezy island stroll.

It's vintage Spyro Gyra, which for three decades-plus has confounded music journalists with its insistence on injecting improvisation -- the DNA of jazz -- into a stylistic stew of influences with hummable hooks.

"For 20 years (smooth jazz) has appealed across race and class and gender partly because it asks so little," critic Ben Ratliff wrote dismissively in The New York Times recently. "It is a physical presence but an intellectual absence."

Asked to assess Spyro Gyra, Jason Koransky, editor of Downbeat, compliments the band's chops while dodging a jazz designation.

"To keep a band together that long is really a solid achievement, and those guys really can play," he says. "They're very influential in the smooth jazz realm, but it's not necessarily jazz, it's more instrumental pop. The label misrepresents jazz, which needs all the help it can get in regard to audiences appreciating it. If you listen to Coltrane, you're not going to listen to Kenny G, that's not how it works. But Spyro Gyra is following its artistic vision, and I could never begrudge an artist for making music."

Though well-intentioned, Beckenstein says, that proprietary attitude calcifies jazz and relegates it to a minor corner of the music world.

"Jazz in the early days was such a magical manifestation, and it deserved every protection and encouragement it could get, but much of the jazz press became hyper-defensive to the point they were throwing out some of the baby with the bath water," Beckenstein says. "They were restricting the freedom of the music, and jazz is predicated on freedom."

On the Web site smoothjazznow.com, bassist/DJ Gerald Veasley concisely split the difference, observing of Spyro Gyra: "They inspired a generation of musicians to find a new way to swing."

Yet Beckenstein says Spyro Gyra slowly reduced media resistance. "They've tired of not liking us and have tried to come around -- these days 90 percent of our reviews are really good and our general rep in the world is good and we get Grammy nominations every year," says Beckenstein, though he still bristles at early negative press.

"It affected our credibility in the jazz world, which irked us because we wanted to be a part of it so badly. Even though we were Miles Davis' warm-up band and Freddie Hubbard and Dizzy Gillespie were hanging with us, we felt excluded by the pundits."

He proudly recalls a moment at a long-ago jazz festival that said more about artistic validation in one gesture than critics could in a raft of reviews. "Our keyboardist, Tom, was walking through breakfast, and he doesn't know where to sit," he remembers. "Everyone there is so famous, and there's this guy in the corner beckoning Tom over -- 'Come on over, sit with me, I want to meet you.' It was Count Basie."

Breakfast with Basie -- no better reason to break into a morning dance.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.