“music just flowed out of Lyle”

[ LUKE HOWARD ]

Where to start in talking about Lyle? His playing and approach to composition remain a profound influence. Like many, I initially heard him on a recording with Pat Metheny Group: the first track I remember distinctly is “The Heat of the Day” from Imaginary Day. It was late 1997 and I was interning at a computer company in the Bay Area, accompanied by my DiscMan and a collection of three or four CDs. So I listened to that record many, many times. When I returned home to Melbourne the following year to study music, delving into their back catalogue was a priority.

And how does one define the magic you find in a particular musician? If I was to try and sum up Lyle’s playing it would be to say that he conveyed maximum emotion with an economy of notes. I think the mercurial way he used dynamics within a phrase was a big part of this: I was often left with the feeling that his music would disappear if you grasped it too closely. “September Fifteenth” is of course one of my favourites, but this magic is evident in all of his solos, particularly on ballads from the ECM years. Or take “Close to Home”: who else (except perhaps for the classical greats) could pack such an emotional journey into six short minutes?

Quantity of notes aside, one of my favourite solos is “Straight on Red” from the live Metheny Group album Travels – supremely syncopated and energetic and yet never losing his cool. Ditto “Chorinho". I think I would have been sweating bullets by the second bar in either of those tunes, but the music just flowed out of Lyle. That record to me oozes hope and adventure, and sowed the seeds of wanting to tour one’s own music.

The piano is, ultimately, a ‘button pushing’ instrument – there’s ostensibly no difference between dropping a dead weight on the key and playing it as once the note is struck, nothing (apart from the damper position) can change the sound of it. Yet in the hands of Lyle, the piano becomes as expressive as a violin or cello. That is one of the instrument’s great mysteries. Listen to his solo on “First Circle” or, again, “Close to Home”… or really, anything.

In the mid-2000s I had a band that was very influenced by Lyle and the PMG (a group which I always felt was as much Lyle’s as Pat’s). Below you can hear one composition – “Barcelone” – clearly we were channeling “September Fifteenth” when we wrote it. It is written and performed with my dear friend Leonard Grigoryan.

So many things in my own music career were really directly influenced by Lyle’s music: my early attempts in combining the piano with electronics; an interest in through-composed improvisation forms; many pilgrimages to Rainbow Studio to record with the sadly also departed Jan Erik Kongshaug. There are a couple of pieces I play to this day where, every time I take a solo, I do think of Lyle.

Generally I don’t think it’s wise to meet one’s ‘heroes’, but it is a great regret that I will never meet Lyle. He was a, if not the, favourite musician of many of my favourite musicians. His music still moves me, and that says something when you work on and listen to music day in and out. His music is a blueprint for how improvisation can meet composition, and a reminder that music exists to tell a story.

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Luke is a pianist and composer based in Melbourne, Australia.