LYLE MAYS
EBERHARD

FOR YOUR GRAMMY® CONSIDERATION

Best Instrumental Composition - Lyle Mays

ABOUT EBERHARD

On August 27, 2021, The Lyle Mays Estate released the thirteen-minute “mini symphony” entitled Eberhard—a composition completed by Lyle Mays in 2009 for the Zeltsman Marimba Festival, and recorded and produced by him in the months before his passing in 2020. The work features a 16-piece ensemble including a slate of notable names in jazz such as Bill Frisell, Alex Acuña, and Bob Sheppard.

Eberhard is a long-form, multi-section work that is Lyle’s self-professed dedication to the great German bass player Eberhard Weber, a composer whose influence loomed large on Mays and his long-time collaborator Pat Metheny in the forming of the 11-time Grammy-Award winning Pat Metheny Group during the mid 70’s and throughout their careers. According to Steve Rodby (bass player of the Pat Metheny Group and Lyle’s best friend) who did double duty on this recording as co-associate producer and acoustic bassist, “...though he called it his ‘humble tribute’ to Eberhard, it is still 100 percent Lyle in every way.”

While technically a posthumous release, Mays was engaged in the making of Eberhard from beginning to end—serving as composer, arranger, performer (piano, keyboards, and synthesizers), producer, and executive producer, and was actively involved in all of the recording and mixing sessions, which took place in Los Angeles during the latter half of 2019.

Fans will know that Lyle had been on hiatus from his enormously successful touring and recording career with the Pat Metheny Group and as a solo artist (Eberhard will be his seventh release as a leader) since 2011, choosing instead to pursue his myriad non-musical passions. Then, “Lyle’s health took a bad turn in 2019, and at about the same time, he decided to try to get Eberhard recorded. The relationship between those two events is complex. What’s clear is that he would continue writing and extending this music, as was always his process: to try to find every bit of what the material suggested, every note and harmony, and sound it evoked for him. He added parts, expanded orchestration, imagining it all on an even grander scale,” Steve Rodby explains. “The result is this recording, and what he was able to hear in his final days. This wasn’t meant to be Lyle’s last piece of music, and if he had lived longer, he had plans for more.”

Composition: Lyle Mays

Arrangement: Lyle Mays

Producer: Lyle Mays

Associate Producers: Steve Rodby, Bob Rice

Recorded, Mixed and Mastered: Rich Breen

Musicians: Lyle Mays (piano, keyboards, synthesizers), Bob Sheppard (sax and woodwinds), Steve Rodby (acoustic bass), Jimmy Johnson (electric bass), Alex Acuña (drums and percussion), Jimmy Branly (drums and percussion), Wade Culbreath (vibraphone and marimba), Bill Frisell (guitar), Mitchel Forman (Hammond B3 organ, Wurlitzer electric piano), Aubrey Johnson (featured vocals), Rosana Eckert (vocals), Gary Eckert (vocals), Timothy Loo (principal cello), Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick (cello), Eric Byers (cello) and Armen Ksajikian (cello)

Recorded August 2019 through January 2020 at Sphere Studios L.A., East West Studios, Henson Recording Studios, The Village Studios, Autumn Audio.

REVIEWS

"Musical tour de force" is a phrase often overused and abused, but it seems like the best and only way to succinctly summarize Eberhard.”
- John Kelman, All About Jazz

“Rarely has a piece of modern music so completely delivered a portrait of an individual… It’s emotional music, yes, but as always with Mays it’s emotion contained within an appropriate architecture and entrusted only to builders who share its vision.”
- Brian Morton, DownBeat Magazine ★★★★

“In the spectrum of jazz, with well-considered composition on one end of the continuum and free jazz on the other, Lyle Mays, the late pianist, keyboard whiz and composer, was a proponent of classical principles: ‘a champion of structure, organization, deep rational thought, philosophical rigor and order,’ as he once told an interviewer. And he was never afraid to create something emphatically, defiantly beautiful. Those principles are on full display in Eberhard.” 
- Allen Morrison, Jazziz

“It’s a beautiful, intricately detailed, and richly textured work.”
- Lucy Tauss, JazzTimes Magazine

“The efforts of this mini-orchestra result in a thirteen-minute suite that encapsulates Mays’ vision throughout his career: melodic, verdant, bordering on sentimental, but with drops of acid hidden in the corners – attributes shared by its titular subject as well. It’s an undiluted look into the creative mind of one of the last few decades’ most influential keyboardists. As such, Eberhard is a fitting capper on a remarkable career.”
- Michael Toland, The Big Take Over

“Lyle Mays’ Eberhard is yet another release by the composer, keyboardist which sets a high standard. The song is an expansive look both back and forward.”
- Preston Frazier, Slang of Ages

“The longtime musical partner of Pat Metheny gives a tribute to bassist and composer Eberhard Weber on this 13 minute single song, and it’s quite an opus.”
- George W. Harris, Jazz Weekly

“The more I listen to this, the more I aurally observe the nuances of his orchestration, the more I realize how much we will miss Lyle Mays and his beautiful world of sonic colors.”
- Ralph Miriello, Notes on Jazz

“The thirteen-minute opus is unwrapped by Mr Mays, as a collector would a piece of expensive crystal, peeling away its musical wrapping to reveal – at first with just the dark notes of Steve Rodby’s contrabass – the shimmering gem of a piece. The work is conceived of and executed on an enormous musical canvas. The work spins and pirouettes with balletic grace, in a great elliptical arc as the profile of Eberhard Weber emerges at the end of it all, as if a chrysalis has been morphed into a butterfly.”
- Raul Da Gama, Jazz Da Gama