SOMETHING LEFT UNSAID:
Musical musings from Lyle Mays
By Joseph Vella (November 2020)

I met Lyle Mays in 1992 when he was touring with Paul McCandless for an album called Premonition.  After the show, I happened to see Lyle at the bar sitting alone so I went over and introduced myself. He immediately invited me to sit down and talk. He was one of the nicest and most engaging individuals I had ever met and we had a pleasant and wide-ranging conversation about music.  What impressed me about Lyle was that he was completely approachable, open and so down to earth even though he was wildly successful and dare I say, a musical star, especially if you're a fan of jazz and the Pat Metheny Group.   

Our paths would cross again in 1994 when I created the first official website for the Pat Metheny Group. For over two decades, I worked with the PMG and then with Pat as his solo career expanded. During this time, my friendship with Lyle grew. In 2009, I had the good fortune of producing a podcast series with Pat and Lyle for their masterpiece recording As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls.  Following that interview with Lyle, it opened up a new and rich dialog between he and me that inadvertently began chronicling parts of his musical career through another podcast (Jazz Online Interview: Lyle Mays), a written piece for the Huffington Post (Jazz, Math, Tech & Lyle Mays) and an interview feature on the NYU Jazz Podcast which I produce. This interaction led to an ongoing and spirited email chain that continued up until his untimely death.  

Although I was an insider of the PMG, I never knew Lyle’s personal take on specific aspects of his tenure with Pat and the Group. So I began interviewing him about the early days with Pat and the recordings as well as the PMG’s evolution, composing, synthesizers and his takeaways from his stellar 30-year career in one of the most memorable and beloved bands in all of jazz.

What follows are some of Lyle’s personal recollections and detailed accounts from his career with the Pat Metheny Group and what can be considered a vital part of modern jazz history.

Joseph Vella (JV):  It's funny you mentioned The Way Up because the past two weeks I started listening to the entire work again after not hearing it for many years. There are so many details in that recording. I hear something new each time I listen. I have to ask you if that was a sort of grand finale of the Pat Metheny Group?

Lyle Mays (LM):  By the time Pat and I got together to write the music for The Way Up, radio had devolved to the point that even “Are You Going With Me” was being faded out after about two minutes, and that was on those stations that were still even pretending to support jazz. The market was dead to us. Record stores were going out of business and even the jazz radio stations weren't allowed to play even our shortest cuts. Pat and I had no reason to take the "market" into account so we went old school. Not old school, as in traditional jazz, but much older school as in Classical Symphony.  Well, that's where I went. I shouldn't speak for Pat, although he gave me no push-back. 

I think The Way Up is much more easily analyzed in classical terms than modern terms. The obvious media problem here is where to find a modern music critic that is conversant in classical symphonic harmonic or motivic devices? The problem grows larger when one considers this. Say a critic emerged who both understood jazz throughout the latter half of the 20th century as well as he or she understood the development of the symphony throughout the 19th century. Where would such words be published? And where were the readers of such words? The audience for this was maybe me and my few penpals in Germany. I gave the world The Way Up, not because they were asking for it, but because they seemed to be asking for the opposite and that pissed me off. 

Ringtone sales surpassed record single sales in the month before Pat and I wrote The Way Up. That was a historical marker for me and signaled the decline of the attention span throughout humanity. That saddened me. My response was to design the densest and most classically conceived of all of our output.  I wrote massive guitar parts for Pat and he rose to the occasion and created a guitar orchestra that puts The Way Up outside the purview of the symphony in sound or style while remaining fully within it in harmony, counterpoint and form.

The Way Up is a personal triumph for me, but it was released into a world that couldn't have cared less. I am so happy we did it and that we had the horses to pull it off.  We never could have done it without players as savvy as Steve Rodby and Antonio Sanchez and the whole project would have never even got off the ground if Pat wasn't so naturally on the right side of history.   

I feel that in the end, The Way Up is a jazz symphony and will be thought about like that long after I’m dead, I won’t live to read it, but I know what I have done and it is really good.

Tell me about your first recording session with Pat on Watercolors?

Watercolors is interesting to me mainly because I remember so little of the experience. I attribute that to being young (and inexperienced), being unused to jet lag, and feeling intimidated by Manfred Eicher. The first thing he said upon meeting me was how he had just recorded Keith Jarrett and how great that experience was, and he went on for a long time about it. As if I wasn't already scared enough.

I didn't know Pat very well at the time. We had only done a handful of club gigs by then. Anyway, I was grateful for the gig, and is usually the case with young scared people in a new situation, I could think only of myself as I tried not to fuck up.  So I noticed and remembered almost nothing. One thing I can remember is that after we had recorded the long and rubato Sea Song, Manfred wanted to change the mic placement on the piano or some technical shit, and do the whole thing again. Pat said no, that the performance was perfect. They argued. Finally Manfred said something about his technical standards or something and dug in his heels. Somehow the idea of me "simply" playing the piano part again was decided upon. I don't remember having a voice in the argument because it wasn't my record, wasn't my music, and wasn't my place to speak up. Now the idea of replacing the piano part only in a long, rubato, improvised group piece, where we were all watching each other, responding to head nods and other body language cues in the moment, is frankly insane and normally impossible. Pat apologized to me, said he felt Manfred was being completely unfair to me and unreasonable or words to that effect, but he asked me to do the piano part again. 

I summoned my inner Chuck Yeager or something and said I would do it. What they didn't realize is that I had pulled off something even more difficult years earlier during the recording of “What Was” on Lab 75. I had decided, in that case, that my improvised free solo was substandard and had to be done again. In that case we had to erase a section of the piano track in a big band recording, I had to improvise a new solo piano improv AND bring a big band back in, at tempo, after some long length of time. The engineers at the time thought I was crazy, and were amazed that I pulled that stunt off.

So for the second time in my young career, I replaced a piano part, in nearly impossible conditions, only this time I did it in one take. Manfred was pleased, Pat was shocked, I was just relieved. Listen to Sea Song again now that you know that I overdubbed the entire piano part. It was quite a feat.

My judgement of the whole affair, Pat's writing, my playing, the group dynamic, is that it was a so-so acoustic jazz recording, not what I was really interested in, and that I was grateful for the gig because I was starving at the time. It was a strange baptism into ECM.

I also think it's important to remember that the Carter presidency was not a happy time for the country as a whole and optimism was in short supply. Just as I felt lucky to get any kind of paycheck at the time, Pat felt lucky to have a record deal with Manfred. Neither of us exactly felt powerful or confident at the time and there was little external evidence to indicate that bold moves would be rewarded in that economic climate.

But you know, that just makes Pat's decision to quit Gary Burton, recruit me, form a band and strike out on our own even more surprising. Mortgage rates were approaching 20% by the end of the 1970's. Nobody was betting on the future, except for maybe Ronald Reagan and Pat Metheny. 

So Watercolors came at a pivotal moment. I think it crystalized, for each of us, the thought that yeah, we could do that 70's combo thing, but that wasn't enough. We both wanted more. I think that the very lack of ambition of a record like Watercolors led to a rejection of thinking small for each of us in different ways. Watercolors might have been an important step in the way in that we each vowed never to do that again, probably for different reasons, but the conclusions were the same: no more business as usual.  And that is exactly what happened.

Tell me about the early days with Pat.  Also, what’s the biggest misconception regarding your artistic partnership?

In 1977, I was emerging from my NYC obscure starving artist days, had a well-paying gig with R&B singer Marlena Shaw, and was occasionally gigging with the likes of Mike and Randy Brecker, Will Lee, Steve Jordan, etc. I was finally making money when Pat said we should form a group and tour the country in a van. I told him he was crazy and said no. 

Now we had already done a few club gigs together in Cambridge so we both knew we had some chemistry, but I thought that what he was proposing was a fantasy. But Pat is nothing if not stubborn. He gave me the hard sell, no it was even more intense than that. When Marlena’s guitar player quit, Pat bought a wah-wah pedal and took the gig just to spend the whole time talking me into forming a band. That was fascinating. Nobody had ever courted me with such intensity. He convinced me that he was serious, he was willing to leave Gary Burton, and that I was key to his plan. His belief in his vision was so strong that I finally relented. He knew that I had written all the charts for Lab 1975. He wanted to make creative composition a centerpiece of the band and that was like catnip for me.

So fast forward to a few months later. I had rented a carriage house with Danny Gottlieb, the new band was set up in the living room. Pat went into debt to buy a Dodge van and rent a grand piano. I went into debt to buy an Oberheim 4-voice, which was Pat’s idea btw. Pat essentially forced me into becoming a synth pioneer because to use synths back then, one had to be a synth programmer. Things went at supersonic speeds at first. Pat and I wrote “San Lorenzo” and “Phase Dance” together within the first couple of weeks. 

The biggest misconception most people have about our partnership is how much each of us wrote.  Anything that sounds remotely like George Martin was me. Not only that, but I wrote a lot of the foreground parts too. I often arranged and composed the very form of what we were playing. I considered it my personal responsibility to maintain a high quality of sound within the PMG over the years.  Cuong Vu tells an interesting story. He noticed soon after he joined, that wherever a rehearsal would stop, the whole band including Pat would turn and face me. Cuong realized that I also functioned as the conductor, the maestro. I was always the first person to speak. Pat in his infinite wisdom had ceded that power to me. I was the best maestro in the group and I had always made him and the group sound fantastic. It was a classic win-win scenario. I worked hard to make the group sound fantastic.  I wanted to be a maestro playing with great talent.

When you guys were recording on ECM, what was it like working with Manfred Eicher and what was his role on those albums? 

Manfred and I butted heads like two rutting elks. We fought. He wanted to turn the PMG into a European ensemble with various guest artists playing free-form jazz he could conduct like Werner Herzog. I wanted the PMG to be an American ensemble, featuring highly structured compositions, ironically rooted in completely different Germanic traditions. I was the champion of structure, organization, deep rational thought, philosophical rigor and order, while the modern German argued for let-it-loose ideas of free form expression, I was the old guy in the room, the conservative, pointing to Bach, Thomas Mann and Kurt Godel. It was truly bizarre. Nothing in my life had prepared me for such a fight, but I won as a kid in my early twenties. Pat left ECM and we became an American band starting with American Garage. It was a very important step in our development because we had to do everything ourselves from that point on, I think we did it very well, thank you very much.  The PMG didn’t need producing. We were brimming with ideas. We needed freedom.  We were very competent, very serious and very diligent.

During those early ECM years, you and Pat were like entrepreneurs creating and evolving your own business and pushing specific boundaries while also challenging yourselves in the process.  There is a lot going on when you are pioneering most of which you don’t even know is going on underneath it all.

Haha. Well, either we would change ECM or we would have to leave because ECM was not going to change us. It was two giant egos against one. Pat was equally strong in his determination. Pat had so many ideas at the time.  My relationship with Pat back then was more like, what are you interested in and how might I contribute? I found many ways to work synergistically. Manfred Eicher was very autocratic. Those two were destined for conflict on that plane alone. I valued organization, order, composition and very traditional musical values. My conflict with Manfred was also equally predictable given his desire to insert himself in projects the freer they were. I hated his values and encroachment.

ECM had done a lot of good for a lot of jazz guys. We were kids. Manfred gave Pat his first record deal. It takes big balls to go against Gary Burton, Manfred Eicher, and a lifetime of moral education about respecting your elders and all that not to mention biting the hand that feeds you. I was an unrelenting voice for biting at the time but I probably did not realize any of the implications. I was really full of myself because I had practically taken over a university jazz department and produced a Grammy-nominated album years ago so I kinda thought <just go for it> was a winning strategy.

I would hope that Pat would realize that we bolstered each others confidence, we found more common cause and more comfortable working conditions working with each other as we pushed others to the sidelines. My memory is that neither of us felt a need for Manfred guiding or directing us because, together, we were going to a new cool place which was where we wanted to be, and it was not the direction Manfred wanted to go.

Pat and I saw a future that Manfred could not even grasp or articulate. To be fair, maybe Pat and I couldn’t either, but at least we were spending time in the labs inventing it.  Manfred did not even know that such labs existed.

In some ways you and Pat were not unlike Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak building the first Apple computer in the garage. They were highly progressive and brilliantly talented guys, had drive and determination, vision, passion, rebellious attitude and this insanely amazing energy and it had to come out and manifest in reality. The rest is history.

The first notes one heard on the first album we released, the White Album as so many have called it, were on an electric 12-string with an alternate tuning, That was followed by a giant autoharp chord. The first melody which followed was on fretless bass doubled with left-hand piano. Within seconds we had demonstrated that we were going to orchestrate the music like some kind of chamber ensemble.  At the height of fusion and narrow tie retro jazz, we sounded like nobody else. We played compositions not tunes. There was a kind of magical sweet spot involving Midwestern sincerity and Classical principles which probably required two precocious kids from the Midwest to find. I don’t know, I was just so thrilled to be on that wild ride. 

I think there was an element of the Jobs Wozniak story in that Pat and I did kinda invented the group in the front room of a rented carriage house in the back of a lot in Cambridge, MA. We definitely wanted to make something great and we were tinkerers, Pat inventing new tunings for guitars and new settings for his digital delays, me programming sounds on the Oberheim 4-voice and finding new uses for autoharps. There were high concept discussions on dynamics, orchestration, form, pacing, drama, presentation...everything. It was the opposite of the jam session. We designed the group, it didn’t just click into place. It was engineered and built.

We already didn’t need Manfred when we went to record our first record. We had already designed every element of that record. We got along great with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug because Pat and I thought about and dealt with sound a lot. I think Manfred was bored because he didn’t have anything to do. That dynamic continued for years.

It seems like such a great story, but I was there so of course I can’t speak with anything close to objectivity. People have called us the Lennon and McCartney of jazz, but I think your observation about Jobs and Woz is more astute and possibly a better fit. Lennon and McCartney needed George Martin. We were the George Martin of the PMG ourselves. We did it all in-house. Steve Rodby handled all the logistics or editing, I handled all the orchestration and compositional odds and ends, Pat handled the vision. At our best, the PMG functioned like a very fluid company, sometimes with Pat functioning as CEO and media spokesperson, sometimes with Pat and me retreating to tinker and compose the next thing, sometimes with Steve Rodby, Pat and me acting as the board making hiring and firing decisions or on-the-spot recording decisions. It is even more complicated, but it mostly worked and it worked for 30 years, which in that era is almost unbelievable. 

We functioned as both a creative band and a successful company, which is what I think the real story is here. 1978 to 2008 was a very tumultuous era, yet we were stable through the whole thing.

Can you expand more about functioning as both a creative band and a successful company?

It gets even deeper when one considers the combined intelligence of Steve Rodby, Pat and me. We were all smart guys, not content with talent alone, always reading. learning and getting stronger. When we discussed things, the conversation elevated and we learned from what the others knew. When Pat and I saw how well Steve handled the studio, we immediately adopted his style as an example of best practices. It was fast and frictionless.

Steve and I read voraciously. We bonded over that. I had read about leadership and my interesting takeaway is that the smartest guy in the room is seldom a good choice for a leader. That guy will not be comfortable in the role and will probably lack some other qualities required. It turns out that the happiest place in the room for the smartest guy in the room is at the right hand of the leader, where he can be turned to for brilliant arguments supporting the leaders vision. It is synergy 101 and I practiced it to perfection. We all recognized each others best qualities and sought to enhance and harness them, Steve and I both recognized that Pat was a natural born leader and neither of us had the least impulse towards challenging that. On the contrary, we talked about how best to implement his vision. We all had drive and ambition, but there was rarely harmful infighting - the thing that drives most bands apart. 

We actually discussed how each of our talents could best be applied for the maximum success of the enterprise as a whole. It was remarkable. We were talented, but we were also really smart, and most importantly we were consistently effective. The PMG was incredibly self-reflective, open, flexible, adaptive, nimble, articulate, interactive and synergistic.

Who should have managed the giant brains of Bell Labs in its heyday? The greatest theoretical physicist? The greatest applied scientist?  No, it took a guy, Mervin Kelly who happened to be quite qualified but was content to actually not do the thing but to manage the thing. This is a very important distinction. Pat gleefully often gave Steve great power to manage things when he realized that he and I just wanted to be research scientists for a while, or he wanted to research while I searched for applications or vice versa because he realized that Steve was a fantastic manager, was willing to do it, and quite good at it. This was all above board, understood and agreed upon. I cant stress this enough. We were aware of what we were doing, we discussed our roles and the PMG was as much an exercise in applied thought as an exercise in musical exploration.  As talented as we were, we were very smart about how we went about it How many bands point to Bell Labs or Thomas Edison for inspiration? 

The story is deeper that you even suspected. I encourage you to think big. We certainly did. We learned from Menlo Park and Murray Hill and brought those traditions to jazz exploration much like Jobs and Woz brought those same traditions to computing explorations. Your analogy gets deeper the more I look at it. 

One of the most interesting narratives in all that you have shared is how serious you guys were in pushing the limits of both the music and yourselves.  You stated that you were not traditional jazz personalities but more thinkers, innovative players, composers and improvisers.  In a sense a new kind of “modern and evolved” jazz musician if we can even call you jazz musicians.  But as you said earlier, PMG was bigger than the narrow definition of calling you guys simply a jazz band. You were ahead of the times in what you were writing and how you were creating your own musical language and also drawing from those earlier musical traditions and fundamentals and integrating them into your pieces.

Yes, there is quite a lot to cover in just those first couple of years – a rapid growth and rapid changes. There was a lot of buzz and Warner Brothers, which was handling ECM's distribution at that time, rushed us into recording a live EP. It didn't turn out very well but it was a great learning experience. It may have caused (or maybe we were heading that way anyway) us to tighten things up. I think a lot of jazz bands at the time mistakenly thought that improvisation itself was a "good" to the point that they improvised beginnings and endings, improvised set lists, improvised stage presence and other elements of presentation and production, in short improvised in areas where precise and detailed planning would have been more appropriate. Pat and I had a lot of discussions about the details of production and presentation. You are right in that we became more than a jazz band, almost from the start. We both thought that, while we were both enthusiastic and capable improvisers, we would also make careful planning and preparation a high priority. We also both thought that jazz was a style and improvisation was a technique and there was no law of the universe which said that they had to be linked. We would do spontaneous improvs on things like "My Girl" or "Louie Louie" while also doing highly structured pieces which required classical levels of memorization and ensemble execution. It was almost as if we were determined to make our style undefinable because we both thought that style was the shallowest possible way to think about music. We were musical philosophers and thinkers, who looked like rockers and only pretended to be a jazz band so that clueless Tower Records clerks would now where to place our product. We never thought of ourselves as a jazz band. We were simply marketed that way because the powers that be didn't really know what to make of us.

In a way the world still doesn't know what to make of us because we were the only group in history to win a Jazz Grammy, win a Rock Instrumental Grammy, and get a Pop Instrumental Grammy Nomination in the same year for the same album. I repeat that style is shallowest possible way to discuss music. We made great music. The world struggled to make sense of it and they failed because their tools were too dull, their instruments too blunt, and their sensibilities too coarse. Plus, as we have discovered, we were also functioning as a company developing products for a new age. 

I think the world lacked the metaphors to describe the PMG.  Twenty-somethings were not expected to be both intellectual and entertaining, not to mention financially successful with pension plans and ownership of their publishing and performance rights. We were successful in so many areas because we thought in so many areas. We didn't fit any mold, and that was kinda the point.  

The PMG became a company that produced Grammy awards, Gold Records, sold out concert halls and buzz to this day. We were much more than a band. We were a thing for a while.

What was your first exposure to synthesizers?  How did you learn how to program them and what was your concept and approach to using them in your music?

I was an avid reader of science and technical publications and understood the principles of music synthesis before I bought my first synth. I already had a Rhodes, a Clavinet and several EFX boxes before I bought a Micromoog in 1976. I explored synths because I considered that a natural extension of the exploration of sound technology. I had been making multi-track sound recordings since I was a freshman in high school. I considered each new step in technology as something I had to master because I was alive and alert in my own time and wanted to make the most of each new opportunity. I taught myself to program synths like I taught myself to program computers, by reading and mostly experimenting. That was mostly what we had to do back then. There were no commercial software libraries in the early days. If you owned a synth back then, you had to be a programmer whether you liked it or not. My scientific brain loved it and I became quite good at it. 

From the start, I envisioned synths as expanding the sound palette, functioning as french horns, clarinets, string sections and all those many other exotic instruments that a young struggling band could not afford. I viewed synths as a way to express my orchestrational visions, not as a way for me to express my personal performance aspirations. In that way I think I differed from most of my colleagues who tried, and mostly failed, to use synths as tools for personal expression. I thought synths were too primitive to be used in that way and was not interested in soloing on them. I think because I focused on how synths could be incorporated into ensembles, I carved out my own niche as the "tasteful" synth guy, using classical principles to make the music richer and deeper when I used synths instead of trying to use them to call attention to myself. I wanted to make my synths sounds disappear into the ensemble like a third chair second violinist where success depends on blending in and where standing out will get you fired.

I came at synths like a classical conductor trying to make an ensemble of children sound adequate, I asked them only to play their parts adequately and not get in the way of the adults. This is an important point, because for all the thickness of any PMG arrangement, the personality of Pat and me as soloists always came through and background parts were always background. That did not happen by accident. This was all highly philosophical, thoroughly planned and carefully executed. So yes, it was designed, thought out and based on classical principles.

One thing that is very noticeable now that I am reviewing the early recordings more surgically is that your sound and playing is quite developed even though you were still quite young. It dawned on me listening to Watercolors and some of your solos captured there and then listening to the White Album. “San Lorenzo” alone is such a statement and features so much of your sonic thing.  It’s also interesting that the first track on the debut PMG album features a major solo by you.  Was that planned?    

While it's flattering to think that my early work scans as mature, my experience was exactly the opposite. Pat had already developed his own sound (with the digital delays) and was already playing some signature licks by 1978. My esthetics caused me to adopt any sound (on acoustic or electric piano, organ or synth) which seemed to fit the music. Likewise, I chose notes, whether written or improvised, which seemed to best serve the specific music we were playing. At the time, I thought that I was all over the map and therefore had no distinctive sound or style.

Now I see things much differently.  At the time, I thought that because I wasn't playing every piece with the same sound or filling every solo with "my" licks, it meant I had no distinctive personal style. So I felt I hadn't found my voice yet, because that's how my immature brain thought of the idea of distinctive personal style.

So I gave up on searching for a single distinctive sound and gave up searching for a collection of (easily identified and copied) signature licks and kept composing, offstage and off-tour or on stage, in real time.

Now I see like you, that I was indeed developing a style and that style was based on depth, breadth, intellect, and all those things which can't be easily identified or copied. Now people say that I have both signature synth sounds, a signature piano sound, and a unique approach. What irony! I found my "style" by rejecting style as a valid pursuit and instead dug deeper. I think what people hear and respond to is the depth, and it seems to take them a while.

My first record was panned and my second record savaged, at the time. Now people talk about them in very different ways. I think I will be remembered very differently by historians who will have the benefit of time.

Btw, Pat planned for "Phase Dance" not "San Lorenzo" to open the White Album. Manfred Eicher insisted that because "San Lorenzo" had a wider dynamic range, it had to be first on the LP because the technology of the time meant that wide grooves came before narrower grooves on LPs. So the world heard my solo first by accident. 

Creatively, that must have been such a rush to write those big signature tunes right out of the gate. In many ways, those tunes were the foundation of your success, partnership and unique musical language with Pat. That is what history will remember.

Yeah, coming up with “San Lorenzo” (especially) and “Phase Dance” so quickly was a very auspicious start, I do have point out one thing though: I wouldn't call them tunes. They were much more than that. They were compositions which had drama, pacing, interesting use of form, and creative thought put into areas beyond melody, harmony and rhythm. For example, I wrote the intro to “Phase Dance” which is a little lesson in orchestration and compositional drama.

Pat often got credit for my genius because most people don't pay attention to the finer details, but it is exactly those details which make the magic. Oh well, the average person probably doesn't know the names of the screenwriter or cinematographer behind their favorite movies either. Hell, they may not even know who the directer was. Most people can't see past the stars.

I gave Pat the absolute best I had not because it would bring me glory but because it was in the service of art and it was the right thing to do. The PMG was very professional and polished in its presentation, but there was so much meat on the bones. There was substance there, I worked hard to put it there, but one has to understand the musical language and a bit about musical history to parse it.

Offramp is an interesting album because it marked the intro of Pat playing Synclavier and the Roland Guitar synth but also your synth playing is quite prominent in the music in a number of ways. The group’s overall sound is evolving here too.  At this point (1981/82), you guys are clearly in a new zone.  What was happening with the group and the adding of Steve Rodby on bass?  Were you and Pat evolving the sonics of the group on purpose or did it naturally evolve post Wichita and what was learned during that recording?

I agree that Offramp offered a big expansion in our sound because the technology had changed, but the principles remained. We were still doing compositions mostly rooted in the classical tradition, forging a new ensemble sound (also rooted in orchestral traditions) and taking jazz to a place that it had never been before.  And this was done with careful thought and intellectual discussions, now even more intellectual with the addition of Steve Rodby.

“Are You Going With Me” could never have existed without Ravel's Bolero. “Au Lait“ could never had existed without Debussy.  We were getting modern jazz fans to think about French Impressionism in an era of corporate greed. We did it without preaching. We did it by simply making the product so cool you had to have it.  We used the tools of capitalism to educate and enlighten.  Our fans thought they were being entertained, but they were getting so much more.  It still makes me laugh in a mad wizard sort of way. That was quite a trick. 

But we can't skip over the time period between the recording of Wichita and the recording of Offramp, because so much happened both in the band and in technology in that time. There are no official recorded examples of the transformation, but we went from a band mostly playing clubs to a band mostly playing concert halls. We got more cinematic and orchestral in the process. We hired sound and light crews.  Those were big changes.  We were still called a jazz band, but we were behaving like a rock band with trucks and buses and putting on shows instead of playing gigs. We went from four people to five on stage, but the change was far deeper than that. We scaled up big time. The crew got bigger, the vision got bigger and the thinking got bigger. The period between Wichita and Offramp is when the modern PMG was born. 

We went from two artists on stage to four so that exploded possibilities as the combinational mathematics would suggest. Steve Rodby and Nana Vasconcelos in the band so expanded our possibilities that Pat and I could hardly keep up.  We kept writing, now knowing that a fifth member, someone who could sing and play percussion was the missing link that the early PMG had lacked. That plus our mutual explorations into technology forged the mature PMG, the version that emerged with First Circle.

In regards to sequencing, what did that do for you guys in terms of composing and the live performance?  What are the real challenges in using sequences in a live performance and how did you guys master it? Also, do you think you guys ever over sequenced material either live or recorded? 

As I think about the transition from Wichita to the Synclavier era, the most important new element was not digital synthesis but rather sequencing. Our first foray into sequencing involved the primitive drum machine used on Wichita. "Are You Going with Me" was performed live before it was recorded and it was the first time the band played along with a sequence, start to finish. We had to learn how to do that live as it was a brand new thing for Pat and me and Danny Gottlieb. For Steve Rodby, it was old hat because he had done so many overdubs in studios. For Steve it was simple, for the rest of us it was not. We had to learn both how to play with prerecorded tracks but also how to compose and record sequenced tracks to fit with a live performance so as not to dominate or encroach but to enhance. 

I guess the big question of if we should use even use pre-sequenced material got dispensed with pretty quickly. Pat and I both felt that because we could, we would, and that the real question was how artfully could we do it. Other bands took political positions on the topic and lectured on how sequencers were evil or something. I maintain that Pat and I embraced the idea of sequencing and asked the right questions, like how can sequencers be used artfully. Technology will always change things. Fighting that change is doomed to failure. Trying to influence that change seemed at the time, and still seems to me, the wiser course and will always be the wiser choice. This is a little discussed topic these days but it was enormously important at the time. Most of the jazz world argued against sequencers using what I would call theological reasoning. Pat, Steve and I were atheists, we worshipped nobody and nothing and felt no reservations about exploring any technology. 

My point is that the PMG was unburdened by any jazz theological constraints (we never thought that there was or could be a one true jazz), we were smart and quick and grasped technology as soon as it emerged, and we folded all questions back into the larger question of "How can we make art with this?" I think that should always be the artists' question.  This is a very juicy subject!

I remember hearing grumblings from jazzers back in your heyday that the more you guys sequenced the less soulful or sterile the music sounded.  Do you buy that criticism OR what would you say to those who felt that way?

First, let me say that from day one the PMG never gave a shit about fundamentalist jazz critics or the whole "one true music" crowd.  Fundamentalism in religion or politics is dangerous and evil. In the arts, the stakes may be lower, but the misguided thinking is the same. The entire history of art points to innovation (coupled with expert execution) winning always. It is always attacked too, usually by those who understand it the least and have the most to lose.

The PMG innovated by using sequencers NOT to replace basic bass and drum functions (as in most electronic music then and to this day) but in figuring out how to interface live, humans playing all the important parts with the sequence adding only the sweetening, much like overdubs on a jazz album. Nobody complained when Charlie Parker did an album with strings. We simply figured out a way to add the strings, or any overdub for that matter, live, leaving the real meat of everything to the live players, adding other parts for orchestral or other effects played by the sequence.

This was not easy to do, but my point is that we retained the essence of a live burning quartet playing with the accompaniment of an entire orchestra, big band, samba school, or anything we dreamt up. Those who attacked us were in fact attacking the poor practitioners of electronic music, they were attacking those who replaced live rhythm sections with synthetic ones. We never did that. We played all the main shit live, a point our attackers never seemed to notice, and used technology to make us sound bigger, wider, more sparkly, more unusual, more modern, and ultimately (in my opinion), more interesting. In short, we figured out how to have overdubs played live on the road using technology. That is a simple sentence, but the vision and the execution is another matter. We managed to integrate the performance of a live improvising band with all the magic of the studio in ways that nobody else had even thought of, let alone achieved. We were doing something new and different, and doing it with style, creativity and expertise. We broke rules that most people didn't even realize they were thinking of as rules until we broke them. 

At first, we (in the band) didn't quite know how to think of sequences. Were they an extension of the keyboard rig? That proved too burdensome on me so a separate tech was assigned to handle the starting and stopping of sequences. That led to the discovery that we needed a musician to handle the sequencer tech job. It was an evolution and it led to new job descriptions and new rehearsal methods and further refinements in the sequences themselves. Everything influenced everything else. In the end, the live performances were VERY close to the recorded versions but how we got to each was very different. This was a very important period for the PMG and I think an important period in the development of music technology.

Also, something I've wanted to bring up for a while is how the sequencer in the Synclavier (and other things) gradually changed the writing process for both Pat and me, In the very earliest days of the group, we deliberately left forms and compositional elements vague and worked the details out on the road. Back then it made sense because we were developing  not just material, but a band sound or conception. We didn't really know how to write for an ensemble which was itself growing and changing. Once the Nana period had become stable, and Steve's abilities integrated, Pat and I were both more confident that we knew what we had, and we started designing compositions in more detail from the outset. By the time we came to First Circle, we could design in EVERYTHING from the start. I felt like I was writing a big band chart, because I was that comfortable with my knowledge of what each player could do, what the technology could do and what the results would sound like. “First Circle” sounded as perfect in rehearsals as it sounded in the first live performance, as it sounded for years afterwards. It didn't have to be fixed. It was born sounding the way it sounded.

This is remarkable in so many ways. In the past we kinda had to play pieces on the road for a while, experiment, then record them in a studio, futz over some overdubs, then figure out how to do a live version of that, starting with “First Circle” we removed so many unknowns. For the first time, we could hear what a finished album might sound like, overdubs and all, in the rehearsal studio before we ever played it live (thanks to the Synclavier). This was very exciting and I think it led to even more ambition and complexity.

Did you guys discuss ideas or themes regarding your recordings before anything was written?  For example, I am thinking about Still Life (Talking) and its Brazilian flavor.

There were always conversations ahead of projects, but it wasn't until Pat and I sat down to write together that the direction became clear. Before Still Life (Talking) we may have had an exchange which went something like, "Hey do you want to explore a more overtly Brazilian sound?" "Hell yeah!"

Pat and I both loved Brazil and Brazilian music so that kind of a project was inevitable. Following the success of Offramp and First Circle, Pat invested some money to buy a marimba, a set of vibes and rent Aerosmith's old rehearsal warehouse in Waltham, MA. So for a while we worked like research scientists, showing up everyday to explore the properties of our materials. Pat had already written the whistled tune part of Minuano, but that was it - 16 bars of 6/8 which we were going to turn into an album. I loved it, but it wasn't enough, so I retreated to my own room and wrote the sultry intro, imagining it as a feature for the two new vocalists we had hired to replace Pedro. Pat loved it so I continued and wrote something for the marimba Pat had just bought. I wrote that passage to feature a new instrument we had to play with. Pat had no clear idea of what he wanted to do with those instruments. I simply started composing for them. Pat loved that too and suggested that I follow that up with an energetic interlude. So I composed the brass section counterpoint to get us back to the recap, and then wrote an ending. So that's how that particular 16 bars of Metheny turned into 9 minutes of PMG.

So to directly answer your question, discussions ahead of time meant little. Once we started working, emerging results shaped future work much more that prior discussions. It was more scientific than theoretical. 

What excited so many of us about the PMG was the pushing of boundaries in the music.  You guys demanded we open our ears unlike any other jazz groups of the day.  What is your take on this?

The PMG always pushed on the boundaries of what was considered “jazz” in our time because we brought so many elements from outside the jazz realm into the mix. Our many rubato passages came from the classical tradition. Our many grooves came from ethnic traditions, from Brazilian samba to Tennessee rockabilly. Overall, Pat let me put a very European sensibility on everything by allowing themes to be developed, varied and combined.  In essence, the PMG had a huge database, a super fast processor and desire to make something new rather than conform to anything that had ever come before. Our mandate was to be new yet deep.

On the outside, we WERE bringing in a whole new crowd because our concerts were getting the very reputation of a happening, which wasn't normally how jazz concerts were thought of.  This was a new kind of fusion, fusing not just jazz with rock, but electric with acoustic, music with technology, classical form with modern improvisation, spectacle with substance. We were the Hamilton of our day because we merged the past with the present, recast it in Pink Floyd vernacular, and were very good at all of it. I think the public will always respond to smart people who can excel and synthesize.

Lastly, I think an important aspect of what made the PMG is that Pat and I were both quality soloists who could hold the spotlight, but we were both writers. Together, we could do anything, I offer Imaginary Day as proof. That album covers more territory than any other album I can think of.

In a nutshell, why do you think the PMG was so successful?

There is a tendency for successful people to assume that their success is due to their own decisions, actions and insights.  I think the real picture is far more complicated and difficult to analyze. In the case of the PMG, I feel that we were very lucky to have emerged in a period when there were still independent programmers at radio stations (and independent radio stations), brick and mortar record stores with a somewhat knowledgeable staff, numerous small jazz clubs across the nation, a music industry that represented a larger percentage of the entertainment options (prior to cable TV, the internet, streaming and smart phones), and very little giant corporate influence and the resultant compression of options into fewer and fewer choices. It is probably impossible to fully explain the success of the PMG, but I have to acknowledge those factors that were completely outside our control.  To ignore such things is hubris.