Lyle Mays
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Lyle Mays, born 1952 in Wausau, Wisconsin, USA, is a jazz pianist. He is best known for his work with Pat Metheny as a member of the Pat Metheny Group.
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Biography
Of his four dominant interests - in all of them being a child prodigy - chess, mathematics, architecture (building with LEGO bricks as a kid) and music, the latter developed to be his area of focus. Being the son of musically interested parents - his mother played the piano in church, his father played guitar by ear - he soon was allowed to explore the piano with the help of a teacher, Rose Baron, who was open to letting the kid, who had perfect pitch, improvise after the formal lesson. He soon was playing organ for the church.
At the suggestion of Dan Wheelock, his eighth grade band instructor, he attended summer camps where he met Rich Matteson who first introduced him to important jazz artists. Bill Evans' album 'Live in Montreux' was among his revelations. He attended University of North Texas for its inspiring environment of geeks avid to jam whenever and wherever possible. He composed and arranged for the One o'clock Lab Band (http://www.music.unt.edu/jazz/proghistory.html) and was the composer and arranger of their highly regarded Lab '75 (http://www.music.unt.edu/jazz/records.html) album.
After leaving UNT, Mays toured with Woody Herman's group for about eight months.
In 1978 he met Pat Metheny with whom he founded the still-performing Pat Metheny Group, one of the most successful jazz bands ever. During that period he lived in New York City, so poor that he was "almost starving", but he continued to pursue his concept of music and artistry. Later, he moved back to rural Wisconsin where, among other activities, he coached an adolescent soccer team. He also flirted with the idea of moving to Brazil but finally - at the end of the 1990s - moved to Los Angeles which is "the opposite of so many cities".
Character of his work
Within the context of the Pat Metheny Group, he cooperates with Metheny in composition and provides arrangements, orchestration and - most remarkably - the complex harmonic and metric backbone of the group's musical signature.
His albums as a leader reflect a large variety of musical interests: "Lyle Mays" and "Street Dreams" expand the ideas of the Pat Metheny Group, while "Fictionary" is a straight-ahead jazz trio session featuring Marc Johnson on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. "Solo: Improvisations for Expanded Piano" is curious album of spontaneous piano improvisations, laboriously edited after the fact.
He has also composed and recorded music for children's records, such as "Tale of Peter Rabbit," with text read by Meryl Streep.
Following his talents and interests, Mays aspires to incorporate divergent elements: composition and improvisation, improvisation and orchestration, acoustic and electronic, old and new. He has spent a lot of time and energy in making use of synthesisers despite their "inherent unmusicality". Furthermore he composed classical music like "Twelve Days In The Shadow Of A Miracle", a piece for harp, flute, viola and synthesizer (recorded 1996 by the Debussy Trio).
As a pianist he manifests strong technique, flowing lyricism, and a supple touch; his solos are often described as developing from almost silence to cascades of sound, often strongly organized around a recurring motif or motifs, or a basic stylistic principle. This sort of playing reflects his compositional way of counterpuntal complexity, his concept of soloing as "real-time composition"
As a composer Mays is interested in the complex form, expanding the motifs and most often building suspense by gradation and ascension. Modulations and metric shifts are often incorporated.
Mays' oeuvre is small; critics evince frustration with his talent (manifested on "Fictionary") lying fallow. Apparently Mays maintains interest in other intellectual occupations: architecture (he designed his sister's house), mathematics and logic (Hofstadter's book Goedel, Escher, Bach) and computer programming C++.
Additional Reading
- Music and Intellect - a portrait of Lyle Mays (http://www.jazzreview.com/articledetails.cfm?ID=655)
- interview 1 (http://www.jazzreview.com/articledetails.cfm?ID=657)
- interview 1 continued (http://www.jazzreview.com/articledetails.cfm?ID=656)
- interview 2 (http://www.patmethenygroup.com/scrapbook/interviews.cfm#4)
- interview 3 (http://www.patmethenygroup.com/scrapbook/interviews.cfm#5)
- Lyle Mays: The compositional Process (http://www.ammon-web.de/jost/alt/site/jazz-composer.html)
- The Expanding Piano (http://www.ammon-web.de/jost/alt/site/dichotomies.html)
- Song For Bilbao - a study of the diachronic development of Mays' soloing (http://www.ammon-web.de/jost/lm-project/mccoy/mccoy.html)
Links
- The most comprehensive discography of Lyle Mays (http://marc.morvan.free.fr/lyle_mays/disco/index.html)
- List of any recorded compositions of Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny (http://www.ammon-web.de/jost/lm-project/archive/PatMetheny-LyleMays-Songs.doc)
- A live radio performance recorded December 4, 1999, featuring Lyle Mays with Bob Sheppard, Dave Carpenter, and Peter Erskine (http://play.rbn.com/?url=livecon/kcrw-cp/demand/cl/cl991204Lyle_Mays.ra)
Discography (selected)
Lyle Mays
- Solo, Warner Brothers 2000
- The Debussy Trio - In the Shadow of a Miracle, Sierra Classical, 1996
- Fictionary, Geffen 1993
- Street Dreams, Geffen, 1988
- Lyle Mays, Geffen, 1986
Pat Metheny Group
- The Way Up, 2005, Nonesuch
- Speaking of Now, 2002, WB
- Imaginary Day, 1997, WB
- Quartet, 1996, Geffen
- We Live Here, 1995, Geffen
- The Road to you, 1993, Geffen
- Letter From Home, 1989, Geffen
- Still Life (Talking), 1987, Geffen
- First Circle, 1984, ECM
- Travels, 1983, ECM
- Offramp, 1982, ECM
- As Falls Wichita, so falls Wichita Falls, 1981, ECM
- American Garage, 1980, ECM
- Pat Metheny Group, 1978, ECM
- Watercolors, 1977, ECMde:Lyle_Mays