Spyro Gyra to perform 35th Anniversary Tour

NEWTON — Spyro Gyra will return to the Newton Theatre on Friday, June 27 at 8 p.m.

Spyro Gyra is going to present a never-before-seen event for its fans, performing the entire "Morning Dance" album in sequence for the first time ever, in honor of the 35th anniversary of the breakthrough platinum album. They’ll also perform their other musical highlights.

How many bands in instrumental jazz or any kind of music, can boast a 40-year career, gaining and keeping fans over almost four decades? Yet Spyro Gyra shows no sign of slowing down, having garnered Grammy nominations for four consecutive albums in the last 10 years while touring worldwide year-round.

When this group first gathered in a club in Buffalo, N.Y. at "Tuesday Night - Jazz Jam", no one would have predicted their eventual success. They would go on to release 30 albums of new material with sales of more than 10 million copies while having played more than 5,000 shows in their career.

This year, 2014 marks 40 years as a band. It is also the 35th anniversary of "Morning Dance," the musical achievement which truly introduced them to the world at large. To observe these dual anniversaries, the band will perform the entire "Morning Dance" album in sequence for the first time ever in its career.

Among those highlights will be selections from "The Rhinebeck Sessions," the band's 30th album and its first to be written entirely in the studio over the course of just three days.

In the early days of April 2013, founder and saxophonist Jay Beckenstein and the members of Spyro Gyra entered a recording studio in Rhinebeck, N.Y., a small town in the Hudson Valley not far from Woodstock. Beckenstein and his bandmates set out to do something that they had never done before in their nearly 40 year history — improvise with each other over three days and in the process write and record an entire new album. What came is a collection of mostly uptempo, often funky pieces that stands toe to toe with the best of this group's prolific output, which garnered a multitude of rave reviews.

"My hope is that our music has the same effect on the audience that it does on me," says group leader Beckenstein. "I’ve always felt that music, and particularly instrumental music, has this non-literal quality that lets people travel to a place where there are no words. Whether it’s touching their emotions or connecting them to something that reminds them of something much bigger than themselves, there’s this beauty in music that’s not connected to sentences. It’s very transportive. I would hope that when people hear our music or come to see us, they’re able to share that with us. That's the truly glorious part of being a musician.”

Tickets for Spyro Gyra are $42 for premium seating, $37 for orchestra and $32 for balcony. Purchase tickets by visiting www.thenewtontheatre.com or contact the box office at 973-383-3700.

The historic Newton Theatre, located at 234 Spring Street in Newton, N.J.