I recently saw that Lyle Mays passed away this past Monday.
For those uninitiated, Mays was collaborator with one of America ’s
finest musicians, Pat Metheny. Mays won 11 Grammy awards for his arrangements
over the years. He has recorded with such diverse acts as Rickie Lee Jones,
Woody Herman’s Big Band, Joni Mitchell and Earth, Wind & Fire in addition
to his work with Metheny.
I cannot hear Pat Metheny without recalling my brief but
wonderful time at WWUH. Metheny was really burgeoning in popularity during the
late 70’s and early 80’s. WWUH had inherited a sizable jazz library from a
defunct commercial radio station and really was the only station in CT at the
time to play a substantial (6 hours a day at least) amount of jazz over the
air. I learned to appreciate jazz while at the station and Metheny’s music was
the foundation for that appreciation.
The LP which contains this track is titled “As Wichita
Falls, So Falls Wichita Falls”. It was an experimental collaboration between
Metheny’s shimmering guitars and Lyle Mays’ interwoven and expressive keyboard
work. I have always loved this evocative song. To me, it feels like a musical
expression of joy whenever I hear it. That joy will now be tempered a bit by hearing
of the loss of one of its originators, Lyle Mays.
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