Articles

Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.

INTERVIEW February 10, 2021

Lyle Mays Goes Solo

From the 1995-2003 archive: This article first appeared at All About Jazz in May 2001. What if you were to look beyond the obvious of what you normally do each day, and you learned to see beyond? What if your mind, and ears were always open yet you stayed deeply focused and unwavering from your concentration on the moment? For Lyle Mays, it was to pull that which is not obvious from the piano to create ...

ALBUM REVIEW May 10, 2016

Lyle Mays Quartet: The Ludwigsburg Concert

By Chris M. Slawecki

Intentionally or not, keyboardist Lyle Mays seems to maintain a public profile that's lower than low. His most famous engagement is his tenure in a group named for someone else (The Pat Metheny Group), and The Ludwigsburg Concert is only his sixth solo release since his eponymous solo debut for Warner Bros. Jazz in 1985, and his first since Solo: Improvisations for Extended Piano for Warner Bros. in 2000. (Mays does appear in the Metheny Group for The Way Up ...

ALBUM REVIEW February 26, 2016

Lyle Mays Quartet: The Ludwigsburg Concert

By Karl Ackermann

He has been referred to as Pat Metheny's alter ego, in the way that Billy Strayhorn was to Duke Ellington. Pianist/composer Lyle Mays was born with perfect pitch in a tiny rural hamlet of Wisconsin. Had it not been for his family's strong affinity for music, Mays may have had little exposure in that environment. Mays wrote, or co-wrote, with Metheny, almost all of the original Pat Metheny Group catalog from their second ECM release, Watercolors (which included Eberhard Weber) ...

REDISCOVERY January 30, 2015

Lyle Mays: Lyle Mays

By John Kelman

Lyle MaysLyle MaysGeffen Records1986 Today's Rediscovery falls under the category of “where is he now?" I first heard of keyboardist Lyle Mays in 1977, when Gary Burton's quartet (with guest Eberhard Weber), played at the Glebe Collegiate High School auditorium in my home town of Ottawa, Canada. After the show, speaking to the other members of the group--electric bassist Steve Swallow, drummer Dan Gottlieb and a then just starting out Pat Metheny--the guitarist told me ...