Work
In the Pat Metheny Group, Mays provides arrangements, orchestration and the harmonic and metric backbone of the group's musical signature. He occasionally performs on electric guitar as well. 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 build on the content 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 focused on solo piano improvisations.
He has also composed and recorded music for children's records, such as Tale of Peter Rabbit, with text read by Meryl Streep.
The Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago featured an assortment of compositions by Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny for their production of Lyle Kessler's play Orphans.
He has composed classical music such as "Twelve Days in the Shadow of a Miracle", a piece for harp, flute, viola and synthesizer (recorded 1996 by the Debussy Trio).
Read more about this topic: Lyle Mays
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“Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.”
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“The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper,... in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince’s gallery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)