Lyle Mays

Lyle Mays (born November 27, 1953) is an American jazz pianist and composer from Wausaukee, Wisconsin. He is best known for his work with guitarist Pat Metheny as a member of the Pat Metheny Group. Along with Metheny, Mays has been a co-composer and arranger of almost all of the group's music.

Biography

Of his four dominant childhood interests – chess, mathematics, architecture (building with LEGO bricks as a child) and music – the last was developed as 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 was allowed to explore the piano with the help of a teacher, Rose Barron, who was open to letting Mays, who had perfect pitch, improvise after the formal lesson, eventually coming to play organ for the family's church.

At the suggestion of Dean Wheelock, his eighth grade band instructor, he attended summer camps where he met Rich Matteson who introduced him to important jazz artists. Bill Evans' album Live in Montreux was among his revelations. He has also cited Miles Davis' album Filles de Kilimanjaro as an important influence on his pursuit into jazz music. He attended the University of North Texas (then NTSU) for its inspiring environment of music fanatics avid to jam whenever and wherever possible. He also attended the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire from 1971 to 1973. [1] He composed and arranged for the world renowned One O'Clock Lab Band and was the composer and arranger of their highly regarded and Grammy nominated Lab '75 album.

After leaving UNT, Mays toured with Woody Herman's group for approximately eight months.

In 1974, he met Pat Metheny with whom he later founded the still-performing Pat Metheny Group. 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 moved to Los Angeles at the end of the 1990s.

Character of his work

Within the context of the Pat Metheny Group, he collaborates with Metheny in composition and provides arrangements, orchestration and - most remarkably - the complex harmonic and metric backbone of the group's musical signature. He occasionally performs on electric guitar as well (on the song Roots of Coincidence, for example). On the song Forward March, from the Pat Metheny Group album First Circle (1984), and in the concert tour for that album, he played trumpet.

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 fellow North Texan Marc Johnson on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Solo: Improvisations for Expanded Piano is a curious album of spontaneous piano improvisations, laboriously edited.

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. 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 the contrapuntal complexity of his compositional style and his view of soloing as "real-time composition".

As a composer Mays is interested in complex form, expanding motifs and building suspense through gradation and ascension. Modulations and metric shifts are frequently incorporated.

Noting that his oeuvre as a leader is small, some critics evince frustration with this considerable talent (as manifested, for example, 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 Gödel, Escher, Bach) and computer programming in C++.

Discography (selected)

Lyle Mays

• Lyle Mays, Geffen, 1986
• Street Dreams, Geffen, 1988
• Fictionary, Geffen 1993
• The Debussy Trio - In the Shadow of a Miracle, Sierra Classical, 1996
• Solo: Improvisations for Expanded Piano, Warner Bros. 2000

with Pat Metheny

• As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, 1981, ECM

Pat Metheny Group

• Pat Metheny Group, 1978, ECM
• American Garage, 1980, ECM
• Offramp, 1982, ECM
• Travels, 1983, ECM
• First Circle, 1984, ECM
• The Falcon and the Snowman soundtrack, 1985, EMI
• Still Life (Talking), 1987, Geffen
• Letter from Home, 1989, Geffen
• The Road to You, 1993, Geffen
• We Live Here, 1995, Geffen
• Quartet, 1996, Geffen
• Imaginary Day, 1997, WB
• Speaking of Now, 2002, WB
• The Way Up, 2005, Nonesuch

Sideman

• Watercolors, Pat Metheny, 1977, ECM
• Home, Steve Swallow, 1979, ECM
• Shadows and Light, Joni Mitchell, 1980
• Later That Evening, Eberhard Weber, 1982, ECM
• When Elephants Dream of Music, Bob Moses, 1982
• Girl at Her Volcano, Ricky Lee Jones, 1983
• Mrs. Soffel (1984) soundtrack in Film Music (album), Mark Isham, 1987
• Premonition, Paul McCandless, 1991, Windham Hill
• Secret Story, Pat Metheny, 1992, Geffen
• Falling Out, Igor Butman, 1993
• Points of View, Nando Lauria, 1994
• Noa, Noa, 1994
• East Coast West Coast, Toots Thielemans, 1994
• Schemes & Dreams, Pat Coil, 1994
• "What It Takes" in Sheffield Jazz Experience, 1996, Sheffield Lab

Composition

• Tale of Peter Rabbit / Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher
• East of the Sun, West of the Moon
• Moses the Lawgiver
• "Somewhere in Maine" in Marimolin, Marimolin, 1995

Additional Reading

• Music and Intellect - a portrait of Lyle Mays
• interview 1
• interview 2
• interview 3
• The Low Down On The Way Up - The making of The Way Up
• Up and Away - an interview with Lyle Mays about "The Way UP", the Pat Metheny Group record of 2005
• Song For Bilbao - a study of the diachronic development of Mays' soloing (The URL no longer links to the referenced material as of May 7, 2009)

External links

• The most comprehensive discography of Lyle Mays
• List of any recorded compositions of Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny (link broken as of March 2008)
• A live radio performance recorded December 4, 1999, featuring Lyle Mays with Bob Sheppard, Dave Carpenter, and Peter Erskine
• A live video performance from the Free Jazz Festival, Rio de Janeiro featuring the Lyle Mays Quartet with Bob Sheppard, Eric Hochberg and Mark Walker