When I joined Gary Burton’s band in early 1974, our first project was a collaboration with the great German bassist, Eberhard Weber.
Eberhard’s most important release of that era, The Colours of Chloë, was a ground-breaking recording that showed Eberhard to be not just a versatile and accomplished bass player, but an exceptionally original composer as well.
Over the next few years, I was able to perform with Eberhard all over the world when he would join Gary’s band as a special guest, and I found Eberhard to be just as unique and brilliant as a person and friend as he was a musician. In the midst of all that, I made my own first record, Bright Size Life, which got enough attention that I was able to start imagining what it might be like to start my own band at some point.
Several years later, in April of 1976, while performing in Wichita, Kansas with Gary’s band, there was a college combo competition going at the same festival. A quartet from North Texas State was set to perform, and I remembered that my friend Dan Haerle (then a teacher at NTS) had told me about an exciting piano player from Wisconsin that I should hear, and I recognized his name on the program - Lyle Mays.
As they started to play, right away I noted that not only was Lyle an exceptional musician, but that I could immediately hear in my mind what we might sound like together. We met up after the concert, and I asked him to come to Boston the following July, when the school year was up for him, and GB’s tour ended for me. We could do a small gig, and I could see for real what it was like to play together.
People often ask about how our musical rapport developed, and there certainly was a lot of developing going on in the following decades, but honestly, literally from that first note of that first tune at that first gig, whatever that special thing was that we shared together was there.
By the time we played that first club date (at the Zircon in Somerville, MA), Bright Size Life had really taken off and gotten lots of worldwide recognition in ways that were kind of unimaginable even a few months before. That was the music that we were playing for those first performances. Lyle totally understood how to play those tunes in a way that was very difficult (actually, almost impossible) for me to find back in those days, outside of just a handful of players. It was absolutely thrilling to find someone who got exactly what that language was that I was going for, and was able to fit right into it all, especially with another harmonic instrument.
I was starting to think about what a second record might be, and somehow the thought of Lyle and Eberhard together came to mind and made a lot of sense to me. Eberhard had a superb piano player at the time (and for many years to follow) in Rainer Brüninghaus who, like Lyle, was quite influenced by Keith Jarrett while looking to bring an individual perspective to that way of playing. It was easy to listen to Eberhard’s band of that time - Colours, with Rainer - as a reference to how it might sound.
I had had some luck on Bright Size convincing the record company to let me use a then-unknown musician (Jaco Pastorius!) on a recording rather than an established, well-known player. So, when I suggested the idea of bringing another new guy on the scene in Lyle to a date with Eberhard (and Danny Gottlieb on drums), I got the green light to go ahead with writing and planning for it. The recording session was set for just after the first of the upcoming year, 1977, in Oslo, Norway.
Like most recordings of that era, we had two days to record and a day to mix. There was no rehearsal, but I had gotten together with Lyle and Danny in Boston before we went over to run down what I had written for them. I knew it would be all be fine for Eberhard, too; in addition to his own highly original music, he had done dozens of those kinds of record dates over the years as a session player, with Joe Pass, Dave Pike, and many others.
The first time Lyle and Eberhard met was in the studio, and it was instantly an easy rapport. This was Lyle’s first major recording, and between the jetlag from the long flight to Europe and because it was on a label (ECM) with a particular cache at that time, Lyle was understandably a bit nervous. And of course, I was too; it was only my second record as a leader, and those kinds of record dates almost always wind up different than you thought they might be.
Eberhard, being older and more experienced than any of us in the studio, instantly made us all comfortable with his easy-going manner and was especially generous in his support of Lyle. Whatever instant fit Lyle and I had experienced was mirrored in the immediate connection that those guys found in each other. You can hear on the record how much they enjoyed each other, and Danny too. It was a fun record to make and came off almost exactly as I had envisioned and hoped it would.
Watercolors came out in early 1978, right around the time that I was ready to leave Gary’s quartet and start my own band, the Pat Metheny Group. I guess you could say the rest is history from there. I chose Lyle, Danny, and bassist Mark Egan to be in that first edition; we rehearsed for a few weeks and then hit the road.
That began what was essentially several years of constant touring. Between what I had saved up from my paper route as a kid and my three years with Gary, I had enough to buy us a van to drive around in and the new Oberheim 4-voice synth that had just come out. I had just enough left over to install a stereo cassette player in the van (and some blue shag carpeting for the floor….it was the 70’s after all.
And that brings us to Eberhard’s record The Following Morning. Because I was on ECM, we were sent all the new releases on cassette, which became the soundtracks to the thousands of miles we put in on the road. There were many nice records being made during that era, but The Following Morning was the one. We must have listened to that record hundreds of times, crisscrossing the roads of America. It was the soundtrack to our lives during those few years. Those ascending Eberhard-esque guide-tone lines became not only a favorite musical device along the way, but a reference to those thousands of miles of all-night-highway as well.
It was wonderful that Lyle and Eberhard would continue to collaborate and have a relationship over the years. Lyle went on to make an excellent contribution to Eberhard’s record Later That Evening, and even did some concerts with him on some of our off periods.
Years later, I remember going to the premiere of one of Lyle’s pieces for Nancy Zeltsman’s Marimolin duo and knew of his great friendship with Nancy. It is such a warm feeling to know that his final recording makes a connection between that friendship and his admiration for Eberhard, all presented in the form of his own magnificent journey in music.
- PAT METHENY (AUGUST 2021)
Photos: Courtesy of ECM Records, PatMetheny.com