Lyle Mays

Biography

While growing up in rural Wisconsin, Mays had a lot of curiosity but had to learn many things all by himself due to a lack of available resources and information. He had four main interests: chess, mathematics, architecture, and music. His mother Doris played piano and organ, and his father Cecil, a truck driver, taught himself to play guitar by ear. His teacher allowed him to practice improvisation after the structured elements of the lesson were completed. At the age of nine, he played the organ at a family member's wedding, and at fourteen he began to play in church. During his senior year of high school, at summer national stage band camp in Normal, Illinois, he was introduced to jazz pianist Marian McPartland.

Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival and Filles de Kilimanjaro by Miles Davis (both recorded in 1968) were important influences. He attended the University of North Texas after transferring from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He composed and arranged for the One O'Clock Lab Band and was the composer and arranger for the Grammy Award-nominated album Lab 75.

After leaving the University of North Texas, Mays toured in the US and Europe with Woody Herman's Thundering Herd (big band) for approximately eight months. In 1975, he met Pat Metheny at the Wichita Jazz Festival and soon afterward they co-founded the Pat Metheny Group. Mays served as pianist, keyboardist, sound designer, and a core contributing composer for the group over its entire 33-year formation. The group had 23 Grammy nominations, winning the award 11 times.

After the Pat Metheny Group’s long-form recording The Way Up in 2005, a brief 2008-2009 Japan tour, and the "Songbook Tour" in Europe in 2010, Mays decided to retire from public music performance, although he did perform at the Western Michigan University Jazz Club in 2010 and at a Ted Talk event at Caltech in 2011 with his own groups. In an interview with JAZZIZ magazine in 2016, Mays said he had been working as a software development manager because of changes in the music industry.

Work

Mays composed, orchestrated, and arranged as a core member of the Pat Metheny Group, playing piano, organ, synthesizers and, occasionally, trumpet, accordion, agogô bells, autoharp, toy xylophone, and electric guitar. He also composed, performed, and recorded dramatic scores for children's audiobooks, such as East of the Sun, West of the Moon, with text narrated by Max von Sydow; Moses the Lawgiver, told by Ben Kingsley; The Lion and the Lamb, narrated by Amy Grant and Christopher Reeve; and The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher and Tale of Peter Rabbit, read by Meryl Streep. In 1985, Metheny's and Mays's compositions were performed by the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in the critically acclaimed production of Orphans by Lyle Kessler.

Mays was regarded by both professional musicians and music fans as one of the most innovative and creative jazz pianists and keyboardists, but he considered himself more of a serious contemporary composer with an advanced approach to classical music, harmonic aesthetics, and structural development through long forms.{{cite book

Apart from his work with Metheny, Mays formed his own trio with Marc Johnson (contrabass), Jack DeJohnette (drums), and Peter Erskine (drums) and formed the Lyle Mays Quartet with Marc Johnson or Eric Hochberg (contrabass), Mark Walker (drums), and Bob Sheppard (saxophone). In 2015, Naxos Germany released a live double album The Ludwigsburg Concert from their 1993 appearance (with Johnson) there.

One of Mays’ best-known compositions is "Close to Home," or "Mars" as it was initially called. He first recorded "Mars" in a 1977 session with the Dallas fusion band High Rise. The Pat Metheny Group performed the piece live between 1979 and 1982 with Metheny playing the main theme on guitar. Mays experimented widely with the introductory material, settling on the quintessential blend of synthesizer and piano for his eponymous album in 1986. Mays performed the piece on acoustic piano with his quartet as late as 1993. (See interactive timeline of his performances of "Close to Home" at this link.) The R&B/funk group, Earth, Wind & Fire, recorded "Close to Home" as an interlude on their 1990 album Heritage. The prominent Brazilian singer-songwriter, Milton Nascimento, combined Mays' composition with Portuguese lyrics by Luis Avellar to create "Quem é Você," which was recorded on his 1991 live album, O Planeta Blue Na Estrada Do Sol. Another Brazilian singer, Zizi Possi, sang "Quem é Você" for her 1994 album, Valsa Brasileira.

Mays' Oberheim analog synthesizer and his voice counting the second hand of a clock at the recording session, "55..., 3..," which can be heard in the bridge (at 14:56) of the title track of As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (ECM, 1981), was used in commercials for Christian Dior's "Fahrenheit" from 1988 to 2016.

Beyond his use of Oberheim synthesizers as a signature sound, Mays collaborated with electronic keyboard instrument makers Kurzweil and Korg to develop sounds and technologies.

Since Mays was a young child, he was enthusiastic about architecture and constructed fantasy structures with LEGO bricks, keeping this passion through his later years. As an amateur architect, he designed his own house and home studio, and his sister Joan's house in Wisconsin. Mays was particularly influenced by his fellow Wisconsinian, architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright, the father of American modernism. Much as Wright realized the innovative integration of different sources in creating his unique landscapes, Mays consistently sought to bring a deep, intellectual and organic appreciation of structural forms to his soundscape design, jazz composition and performance, and software development projects.

Death and legacy

Mays died in Los Angeles at the age of 66 on February 10, 2020, "after a long battle with a recurring illness".

Mays was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in 2022 for his composition "Eberhard," dedicated to the German double bassist and composer, Eberhard Weber.

Discography

As leader

• Lyle Mays (Geffen, 1986)
• Street Dreams (Geffen, 1988)
• Fictionary (Geffen, 1993)
• Solo: Improvisations for Expanded Piano (Warner Bros., 2000)
• The Ludwigsburg Concert (Jazzhaus, 2015)
• Eberhard (self-released, 2021)

As co-leader

• As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls with Pat Metheny (ECM, 1981)

As a member

One O'Clock Lab Band

• Lab 74 (NTSU Lab Jazz, 1974)
• Lab 75 (NTSU Lab Jazz, 1975)

Pat Metheny Group

• Pat Metheny Group (ECM, 1978)
• American Garage (ECM, 1979)
• Offramp (ECM, 1982)
• Travels (ECM, 1983)
• First Circle (ECM, 1984)
• The Falcon and the Snowman (EMI, 1985)
• Still Life (Talking) (Geffen, 1987)
• Letter from Home (Geffen, 1989)
• The Road to You (Geffen, 1993)
• We Live Here (Geffen, 1995)
• Quartet (Geffen, 1996)
• Imaginary Day (Warner Bros., 1997)
• Speaking of Now (Warner Bros., 2002)
• The Way Up (Nonesuch, 2005)

As sideman

With Pat Metheny

• Watercolors (ECM, 1977)
• Secret Story (Geffen, 1992)

With others

• Phil Wilson & Rich Matteson, The Sound of the Wasp (ASI, 1975)
• Steve Swallow, Home (ECM, 1980)
• Joni Mitchell, Shadows and Light (Asylum, 1980)
• Eberhard Weber, Later That Evening (ECM, 1982)
• Bob Moses, When Elephants Dream of Music (Gramavision, 1983)
• Mark Isham, Film Music (Windham Hill, 1985)
• Pedro Aznar, Contemplacion (Interdisc, 1985)
• Betty Buckley, Betty Buckley (Rizzoli, 1986)
• Bobby McFerrin, Medicine Music (EMI, 1990)
• Woody Herman, Live in Warsaw (Storyville, 1991)
• Paul McCandless, Premonition (Windham Hill, 1992)
• Igor Butman, Falling Out (Impromptu, 1993)
• Toots Thielemans, East Coast West Coast (Private Music, 1994)
• Nando Lauria, Points of View (Narada, 1994)
• Noa, Noa (Geffen, 1994)

Film and audiobook scoring

• The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher & The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Rabbit Ears, 1988)
• East of the Sun, West of the Moon (Short Video) (Rabbit Ears, 1991)
• Moses the Lawgiver (Rabbit Ears, 1993)
• Mustang: The Hidden Kingdom (TV Movie documentary, 1994)
• The Lion and the Lamb (Short Animation) (Rabbit Ears, 1996)

Transcription book

• The Music of Lyle Mays: Compositions, Transcriptions, and Musical Transformations - Transcribed and edited by Pierre J. Piscitelli, Lyle Mays (Author) (Independently published, 2021)

References

References

1. (October 2, 1974). "NTSU Lab Band Record on Sale". Denton Record-Chronicle.
2. (January 30, 1976). "Grammy Nomination to Lab Band Album". The Courier-Gazette.
3. (12 February 2020). "Lyle Mays, 66, Pat Metheny Group Keyboardist, Is Dead".
4. "Lyle Mays at UNT Division of Jazz Studies". University of North Texas.
5. "The State: Telephone directory for Baldwin and Woodville, Wisconsin: electronic facsimile: Browse Text".
6. "UNT alumnus Lyle Mays to serve as guest artist in February – North Texan".
7. "Really Good Music".
8. "February 2006 – Division of Jazz Studies".
9. (11 February 2020). "Jazz Keyboardist Lyle Mays Dies At 66".
10. "Lyle Mays".
11. (August 7, 2016). "Lyle Mays". JAZZIZ Magazine.
12. (October 12, 2012). "Mark Walker "Chord Bible Belt" featuring LYLE MAYS". [[YouTube]].
13. "Letter from Home – Pat Metheny Group, Pat Metheny | Credits".
14. "First Circle – Pat Metheny, Pat Metheny Group | Credits".
15. "Pat Metheny Group – Pat Metheny Group, Pat Metheny | Credits".
16. "The Way Up – Pat Metheny, Pat Metheny Group | Credits".
17. "Search Pat Metheny – The Roots Of Coincidence – Speaking of Now Live".
18. (8 May 1985). "Theater: Steppenwolf Presents 'Orphans'".
19. "Lyle Mays at the Horizons of Jazz".
20. "Twelve Days in the Shadow of a Miracle Sheet Music by Lyle Mays".
21. "Zeltsman-Intermediate Masterworks for Marimba Volume 2".
22. "Marimolin: Nancy Zeltsman, Marimba & Sharan Leventhal, Violin".
23. "The Ludwigsburg Concert – NaxosDirect".
24. (February 8, 2021). "The Dallas Sessions".
25. "Lyle Mays' Close to Home (Mars) Timeline".
26. (August 10, 2015). "Interlude: Close to Home". [[YouTube]].
27. "Milton Nascimento-Quem é Você? (Áudio Oficial)". [[YouTube]].
28. (November 6, 2013). "Zizi Possi – "Quem é Você" (Valsa Brasileira/1993)". [[YouTube]].
29. {{YouTube. 1OLyAVRc9xI. Christian Dior – Aqua Fahrenheit (Long Version) Commercial (2011)
30. (November 10, 2020). "A Jazz Star, Composition & Legos".
31. (25 January 2007). "Lyle Mays interview".
32. Piscitelli, Pierre. (2021). "The Music of Lyle Mays".
33. (11 February 2020). "Lyle Mays 1953–2020".
34. (April 3, 2022). "Grammys 2022 Winners List (Updating Live)".