Lyle Mays

While growing up, Mays 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.[4] His teacher allowed him to practice improvisation after the structured elements of the lesson were completed. At age nine he played organ at a family member's wedding, and at age fourteen he began to play in church.[5] In summer national stage band camp in Normal, Illinois, he was introduced to jazz pianist Marian McPartland in his senior year at high school.[3]

Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival and Filles de Kilimanjaro by Miles Davis (both recorded in 1968) were important influences. He graduated from the University of North Texas after attending the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.[6][7][8] 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.[9]

After leaving the University of North Texas, Mays toured in the US and Europe with Woody Herman's jazz big band, Thundering Herds, for approximately eight months. In 1975 he met Pat Metheny at the Wichita Jazz Festival and later founded the Pat Metheny Group. Mays had an extraordinary career as a core musical architect and sound designer of the group more than three decades since then. He won eleven Grammy awards and was nominated twenty-three times.[10]

After the Pat Metheny Group’s monumental achievement, The Way Up in 2005 and unofficial Songbook Tour in 2010, he decided to have a semi-retirement, although he performed at the Western Michigan University Jazz Club in 2010 and Ted Talk event[11] at Caltech in 2011 with his own groups. In an interview with JAZZIZ magazine in 2016, Mays said he had been working as a music software manager because of changes in the music industry.[12]

Mays composed, orchestrated, and arranged as the core member of the Pat Metheny Group, playing piano, organ, synthesizers, and occasionally trumpet, accordion,[13] agogô bells,[14] autoharp,[15] toy xylophone,[16] and electric guitar.[17] He composed and recorded children's audio books, such as East of the Sun, West of the Moon, Moses the Lawgiver, The Lion and the Lamb, The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, and Tale of Peter Rabbit with text read by Meryl Streep.[3] Metheny's and Mays' compositions were performed by the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in a production of Orphans by Lyle Kessler.[18]

He was regarded as one of the most innovative and creative contemporary jazz pianists and keyboardists to both professional musicians and music fans, but he was even more serious about classical music as a composer in terms of advanced harmonic aesthetics and structural development through long forms. He composed several contemporary classical pieces, such as "Twelve Days in the Shadow of a Miracle", a piece for harp, flute, viola, and synthesizer recorded in 1996 by the Debussy Trio.[19] Mays also composed "Mindwalk" [20] in 2009 for renowned marimba player, Nancy Zeltsman, and previously "Somewhere in Maine" [21] in 1988 for her duo with violinist Sharan Leventhal, Marimolin.

Apart from the Metheny group, he performed in a trio with Marc Johnson and Peter Erskine and formed the Lyle Mays Quartet with Eric Hochberg, Mark Walker, and Bob Sheppard.

He collaborated with Kurzweil and Korg to develop their new sounds since he had great knowledge of both computer programming and music synthesis that he had learned by himself.

An amateur architect, he designed his own house, home studio, and his sister Joan's house in Wisconsin. He was particularly influenced by the American architect, designer, and the father of American modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright.[22]

Mays died in Los Angeles at the age of 66 on February 10, 2020 "after a long battle with a recurring illness".[23]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lyle Mays.

• At Jazziz magazine
• Podcast
• official website - https://www.lylemays.com