“It was Psalm” — Lyle Mays

[ BILL FRISELL ]

Lyle and I had such a long history. It’s like 45 years. It’s mind blowing.

I moved to Boston in 1975 and I got there to go to Berklee and everybody was saying you got to hear this guy Pat Metheny. So I met Pat while he was playing with Gary Burton’s band. I remember one day I went to a cafe to get a sandwich and Pat was in this place and we sat down together and he was telling me about putting this group together and there was this guy Lyle Mays and you’re not going to believe him. He was just raving about Lyle.

The first time I heard Lyle was at one of the first gigs of the Pat Metheny Group at the Jazz Workshop in Boston. This was long before sampling and digital this and that - talk about analog. I am not even sure what keyboards he was playing in the beginning but that was the first time I heard him and I was immediately a fan.

A few years go by and I left Boston. I went to Europe and soon after I did a tour with Michael Gibbs where I met Eberhard Weber. Eberhard invited me to play on a recording. It was the first recording I did for ECM (Fluid Rustle).

Lyle and I connected on the album with Eberhard called Later That Evening. The record is great but the gigs we did were amazing. There was all sorts of things happening on those gigs. I remember on that tour we were on a bus or a train and Lyle had a Rubix cube and it was like nothing for him to do it. He would say “it’s obvious” you just do this and that. I couldn’t believe it. It was so easy for him.

Before Lyle’s first record (Lyle Mays) and he was working on the music, I was living in New York and I went up to stay at his house in Boston for a couple of days. It was just Lyle and me. He really included me in his process of putting the music together. He was very methodical and clear with what he wanted. I felt lucky that he invited me in at that point where the music wasn’t quite complete yet. We would play things together and he was really including my voice in the way he was shaping the compositions. This was before the other guys were involved with the project. He had a lot of things already worked out and we would play them together and he would see how they fit in the way I played and all that.

He heard in me that I had a sound and he would give me these lines to play which allowed me to sing those lines and gave it a personality. He allowed that to come through while at the same time, it was no one’s composition but his own. A lot of times you get a call to go into the studio and there’s a chart to read. You do your thing and go home. Being in on that moment when he was out there “naked” with these compositions and being in on that writing process was really cool.

In his compositions there was this extraordinary counterpoint where the lines and harmony fit together. It was this beauty. It was psalm. It was singing. If you want to analyze it and break it down it was extraordinary - the technical mechanics of it were incredible but it’s more like a beautiful handmade watch - the inner workings - it was more about the beauty of the melody and harmony.