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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.
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 after the ear - he soon was allowed to explore the piano with the help of a teacher who was open to let the kid, who had perfect pitch, make his mark. He soon provided the church with organ playing.
As a teen he attended summer camps where he met Rich Matteson who opened for him the gate to jazz. Bill Evan's Live in Montreux was among his revelations. He joined University of North Texas for the inspiring environment of geeks avid to jamm when- and wherever possible. He composed and arranged for the and was the composer and arranger of their rewarded album.
In 1978 he met Pat Metheny with which he founded the still performing Pat Metheny Group, one of the most successful jazz bands ever. During that period he lived in NYC, "almost starving" for lack of wealth but undeviating in the pursuit of his concept of music and artistry. In the sequel he moved back to rural Wisconsin where - among others - he coached systematically an adolescent soccer team. He also flirted with the idea to move to Brazil but finally - at the end of the nineties - moved to Los Angeles which is "the opposite of so many cities".
Within the context of the Pat Metheny Group he co-operates 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, "Fictionary" is a "classical" jazz trio featuring Marc Johnson on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums and SOLO is an album for the midi-grand piano, where he improvises the whole album and generates the orchestration from the recorded data (length and dynamics of the key-strokes) after the fact.
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 compoesed 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 disposes of a stupefying technique, an extremely large dynamic range in touch, his solos are often described as developing from almost silence to cascades of sound, always returning to the original motives. 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 motives and most often building suspense by gradation and ascension. Modulations and metric shifts are always incorporated, yet not always perceivable at the first listening.
His works is not very large - there are profound interests in other intellectual occupations: architecture (he designed his sister's house), mathematics and logic (Hofstadter's book Goedel, Escher, Bach) and hacking C++.
Lyle Mays
Pat Metheny Group
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