SOLO (IMPROVISATION FOR EXPANDED PIANO)

This Moment
Let Me Count The Ways
We Are All Alone
The Imperative
Procession
Black Ice
Origami
Lightning Field
Locked in Amber
Long Life

PLAYERS: Lyle Mays (p)

REFLECTIONS:

"For this record," says Lyle Mays of his new album SOLO (Improvisations for Expanded Piano), "I decided it had to be a mixture of electronics, computer, synthesizer and grand piano. It couldn't be a solo piano album. That wouldn't be an honest statement."

What is an honest statement is to say that SOLO, recorded over the course of two-and-a-half days in August 1998 (and Mays' fourth disc under his own name), is also a most audacious melding of improvisation and composition of the sounds and musical traditions that have shaped — and now have been re-shaped by — the multi-keyboardist/composer. It is a work whose depth, subtlety and complexity (particularly in its harmonic language) will engage the most sophisticated ear, yet it offers more than enough melodic content and, especially, dramatic uses of natural and synthetic sounds to reach Everyman (and woman). And from a purely pianistic standpoint, Mays has never sounded more commanding.

"For my entire career," Mays continues, "I've been working with merging acoustic and electric, piano and synthesizer, classical and jazz. So I hit on the idea of recording an album of pieces for the MIDI piano, recording the MIDI data for the computer, improvising these pieces and then orchestrating them after the fact, which I've never heard anyone do before."

And in Conclusion: "The thing I'm most proud of is that I was able to improvise these pieces that play back like compositions. There's no vamping, no hesitation; it's pretty fearless, like jumping into the next lake, or whatever. There doesn?t seem to be any holes in the flow of thought, which is kind of hard to do. I'm not trying to just play jazz. I'm actually trying to compose a piece of music in real time.
"One of the things Pat said to me on the first day we were in the studio, after I'd played a couple of pieces, was 'Yeah, do some more of that stuff where I don't have a clue as to what chord you're playing.' He got that it was complex, harmonically, that I was trying to stake out my own harmonic language. It's the most honest thing I've ever recorded; it shows me on piano and with the synths, and shows me thinking about music and composing. It's the most personal statement I could have made, given what I've been pursuing; yet its forces are equivalent to a symphony orchestra. It's jazz in the most theoretical sense; it's improvisation, the cornerstone of jazz. But I'm not sure if it sounds like improvisation. I'm trying to create little sonatas and little tone poems, and at times big tone poems, smash-the-tympani kinds of tone poems. The intent is not the one of most jazz. It's the self-expression more of a composer than a player."

INTERVIEW:

In the following conversation, from his home in the hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley, near Los Angeles, Lyle Mays discusses those ways in which he found his own manner of creating SOLO (Improvisations for Expanded Piano). He also pinpoints an intriguing modus operandi for expanding the piano to orchestral dimensions. Then, in the track-by-track analysis that appears separately from this biography/conversation, Mays summarizes each of SOLO's ten selections.

TALK ABOUT THE PREPARATION INVOLVED IN MAKING THIS RECORDING."We found a rehearsal studio at Sony Studios in New York. I spent three or four days keeping my chops up because we'd just been on the road. I sketched out some ideas, but we wound up only using one, 'Let Me Count The Ways.' That's an improvisation that's based loosely on a tune I worked up a few days earlier. When we got into the studio, we basically threw everything away. So on the one hand, there was no preparation whatsoever. The first thing I played was the first thing you hear on the record. In the other sense, I'd been improvising pieces on stages, in front of audiences, during a year of touring with the (Metheny) Group. So it's hard to say what the actual preparation was. It was both minimal and year-long."

THE VERY FIRST NOTE WE HEAR IS EXTRAORDINARILY STRIKING, VERY RICH AND HARP-LIKE.
"It's a combination of what I played — synth sound, reverb, an arpeggio — where I held down certain strings and strummed them. The whole record's like that, in that it's orchestral in nature. If you look at the track sheet for the individual performances there are, at times, a hundred things going on."

THE MIDI PIANO PLAYED A VITAL ROLE IN SOLO. TELL US WHAT THE INSTRUMENT IS AND ITS FUNCTION ON THIS PROJECT.
"The Yamaha MIDI grand piano is an acoustic piano that also puts out computer data on what you played. The actual information, like, say, a C-natural held for four seconds, is recorded on a computer in real time. So I had not only the audio performance captured on tape, I also had an exact description of the performance in my computer. So I went back and took that information and then, using the notes I played — with their respective durations, and following everything else I'd done — used them to orchestrate the pieces. This took months and months. It was the first time I'd done anything like this. "In addition, I recorded sound effects basically by crawling around inside the piano, banging it, throwing objects into it, that I could sample for more polished sound effects. But hopefully they would all have the characteristics of the grand piano."

DOES THIS IN ANY WAY COMPARE TO THE PROVOCATIVE "PREPARED PIANO" EXPERIMENTS DURING THE LATE-1930s OF THE COMPOSER JOHN CAGE (1912-1992)?
"I modified the piano, that's a better word. The starting point was the prepared piano, but then, one more level of transformation to the computer took place. But I did try a little bit of the older 'prepared' approach, with wingnuts (inside the piano), but that sounded clanky, like a novelty. I wanted rich, gorgeous pieces and natural piano sound."

OKAY, GETING BACK TO THE MIDI PIANO AND ITS FUNCTION HERE...
"As I said, the MIDI piano offers an exact computer description of the performance, so that at a later point a computer could play through a synthesizer exactly what I played on the piano at the time. The MIDI piano is as rich and full as any concert grand, but it's also equipped with sensors under every key and pedal. It records exactly the physical performance. It could be reproduced on a disclavier, a special instrument Yamaha has developed, which we also used. This is an acoustic piano, as well, but it's one step more sophisticated than the MIDI piano. The MIDI piano just puts out the data that's played. The disclavier can actually, physically reproduce a performance. The disclavier can be plugged into a computer and actually played by that computer. So when you see the keys move, you actually, physically record the performance, not just the sound of the performance."

AND HOW DID ALL OF THESE TECHNOLOGIES FIT INTO THE REALIZATION OF YOUR MUSIC?
"Because I was envisioning an entire orchestra accompanying me as I was improvising. I knew, because of these technologies, that there was going to be, after the fact, all this sound, so I changed the way I played. I was basically trying to show how I think compositionally, in real time. My whole approach to improvisation is compositional, and the best way to illustrate that is to have the large forces of orchestration bringing out all the counterlines, all the little orchestrational touches. It seems like the most honest way to present how I think, musically."

WERE PIANO OVERDUBS USED AT ANY POINT DURING THESE RECORDINGS?
"At one point, at the very end of the record, there's a slow, almost rhythmic piece called 'Long Life' that has something that sort of resembles a conventional solo over (chord) changes. That solo is an overdub. It was designed that way, as a studio piece. It was going to be played to a prepared sequence, to an existing track. But I'm not necessarily responding to improvisational events as much as trying to fit into the music, trying to make it a band piece, almost. That piece was the one exception to the overall concept."

ASIDE FROM THE TECHNOLOGICAL/INTELLECTUAL PREPARATIONS, IS THERE SOME PERSONAL PART OF YOUR LIFE THAT INFORMS THE MUSIC? IT CERTAINLY SOUNDS VERY PERSONAL.
"It almost sounds raw at times. I wasn't holding back at all. But I'm not sure those emotions correspond to any specific thing in my life. I think it's more about the power of art, the power of drama."

"DRAMA" WAS ONE OF THE FIRST WORDS THAT CAME TO MIND IN LISTENING TO THE ALBUM.
"Very intentional. Again, that goes with the idea that I was going to have large forces to support me later. So I knew I could have certain passages be amplified, emotionally as well as sonically. I counted on that and played with that. I hope that people can conjure visual images as they listen, but that's not to say I had specific visual images in mind. I was just trying to do my job as the creator of the music, to make it dramatic, and I think if I do my job right, it's broad enough that there are many possible interpretations, and you can have a different one with a different listener. It's not written in stone. At least that's what I aspire to."

TRACKS: Lyle Mays discusses the individual selections on SOLO (Improvisations for Expanded Piano).

1. "This Moment": "This began with kind of a lucky moment, actually. It was the first thing we did in the studio, and could have just been the sound check; as a matter of fact; the computer technician I hired to run the computer wasn't completely ready. But Rob Eaton, our recording engineer, who is so diligent, put the machine into 'Record' and captured it. Afterwards, what we'd thought was going to be a warm-up, or mic check kind of thing turned out to really hang together with musical coherence. We all said, 'Great! We got one!' It was pretty exciting, and also it started this vibe that kind of stayed through the whole session, where everyone got relaxed because I'd already put a good improvisation into the can. So that set a very upbeat tone, which is the best possible environment for improvising. A friend of mine, who's a writer, is an amateur saxophonist. He's written a book of essays on improvisation, and there's a line in his book where he says he approaches jazz as a hobby, but like armed robbery and skydiving, there are various levels of expertise. Improvisation's like those things, too, in that there's always something at stake. To me that's a wonderful description of the tension and the concentration, the kind of high emotional world you enter when you're improvising, especially when it's just you. It's a scary thing for a musician to face an instrument with no idea of what he's going to play and then try to make a piece of music. So getting that first piece on tape, how can I say it — the mood was high in the studio."

2. "Let Me Count The Ways": "It was the first time I'd looked at one of the sketches I'd written out a few days earlier. So I had a melody that was written down, but very little else, none of the form. I just trusted that I could make that up. So I launched into this two-part melodic passage and trusted my instincts to follow what seemed to want to come next. But since the melody had already been sketched, the mood was already in place and it was fairly personal, tender, almost like a love story or a love poem. And I knew that I had to stay true to that mood for the piece to work. So at least I had an emotional map for that one. "

3. "We Are All Alone": "That was in response to a suggestion from Pat. He asked me to play something really long. That gives you no information, there's no theme, no whatever. I set out with the intention of making it a long piece, so I tried to set up more dramatic themes, keeping in the back of my head that we might visit some rather big places. So I was thinking pretty orchestrally and was trying my best to improvise a long piece that still had coherence — that wouldn't ramble. I was kind of straining intellectually to keep in mind what I had previously played and tie it all together. "

4. "The Imperative": "It's whatever it is at the moment you think is the imperative. I think it's almost a joke because it's constantly changing and it's different for different people. This was the last piece I played. Right before I improvised, Pat came on the mic and said, 'I think we got it,' and I said, 'I think there's one thing we don't have.' Which maybe for me was my imperative at that point — something kind of fast and furious. Because I hadn't played anything like that the whole time; I'd played only moody, orchestral, kind of drmatic things, but hadn't attacked the piano, so to speak. There's no orchestration on it, and there are almost too many notes. There's no room for anything else, but I felt that we didn't have that mood represented on the record and it would add to the variety and the completeness. So, I guess my imperative was that we had something that represented that kind of raw, blurted-out energy. "

5. "Procession": "It's more the mood of a procession. Not at the time, but after the fact I got the image of weddings and solemn occasions, things where people move slowly. It could be funerals, too. I'm playing very slowly and deliberately and really trying to think, a split second before it happens, trying to make every note so deliberate, so inevitable. It's a challenge to do when you're improvising, but I was trying to make a piece that seemed written in stone, even though it was being improvised. Again, if I've done my job, people can think of it as a wedding or a funeral or any other occasion that they think would require a procession."

6. "Black Ice": "We had tried a piece before this where I was experimenting with different musical elements like triplets or high register, or whatever. So it was getting very abstract, almost like an improvisation class for actors. You know, 'You're a tea kettle.' But in this piece, the key words are 'really slow.' And what led from that was this kind of glassy image. But, you know, these titles are after the fact. There was nothing specifically related to black ice in my mind while I was playing."

7. "Origami": "It's the opposite of Wagnerian opera, a small art. The piece sounded small to me, like an afterthought. It has elements of 'careful,' 'delicate,' not reaching for grand things. It's content in its smallness."

8. "Lightning Field": "It may be the most dramatic piece on the album. It's certainly orchestrated that way. I was intentionally playing very harshly. I knew that I would come up with the sounds from my bag of tricks that would go with the electricity. I was deliberately smashing dissonant chords, going for electric kinds of effects on this acoustic instrument. So when I got the tapes home I just went for my most brash sounds to orchestrate that one. Again, going back to try to point to what I was thinking of to bring that out."

9. "Locked In Amber": "The title refers to dinosaur DNA, which comes from a very mundane, 'Jurassic Park' sort of notion. But my intent when I started improvising was to keep the entire piece in the low end of the piano. The end result sounded almost ancient to me; it sounded like echoes of things in the past. So we searched for a title seemed to reflect that."

10. "Long Life": "This piece is the exception to the approach taken on the album. It was written in, I believe, 1976 or '77, in Dallas, when I was down visiting some friends. We got some free recording time and for fun went into the studio, so it's a part of my distant past, a piece that had never found a home. I had the idea that I could do an all-keyboard version of it with various elements of different pianos functioning as the rhythm section. The vibrato on the Rhodes was essentially the drums. Everything that's in the rhythm section was taken from what the original piano part plays. So that was kind of an attempt to make a band just out of pianos. Then I orchestrated some other string kinds of sounds around it, doubled the melody, things like that. More like a conventional recording. "