"you are going places"
[ ROY ALAN FIRESTONE ]
I want to add a final story on my friend Lyle Mays, who was, in my mind, one of the greatest jazz musicians the world has ever known, and this is about work.
His work, but the work of the dedicated artist.
No, accomplished artists may not be BETTER than the average person, the ones who gets up at 5 am to battle traffic to get to work, sometimes for a job they despise .
The ones who take the subway or the bus every day to sit in a chair or work a switchboard or with a construction crew in blazing heat or in some cold office with lives they never dreamed about or cared much for.
Or the folks who plod along in some sort of job to make ends meet, and do it with consistency if not passion.
Those people do their best, and try to get through their lives and make do and put something away for when they've had enough of a rat race.
This is not without respect to those who try and endure life.. doing something that they'd rather not.
I read somewhere that 75% of Americans simply dislike their jobs, but cling to them in many cases because they have to put food on the table or try, and often fail, to put their kids through college.
Those people are worthy of respect, if not admiration, but I still find their lives sad and unfulfilling.
I'm talking about great artists, and in this case the story of a great, and I mean GREAT musician.
Lyle Mays knew what he wanted to do from the time he was 9 years old.
He played piano in church functions and services in his home of a tiny place called Wausaukee, Wisconsin.
He was first inspired, as many kids his age were back then, by the Beatles, but he didn't seem to care about the hysteria and the phenomenon..he focused only on the music.
The structure, the melodies, and the harmonies.
Quickly though, he gravitated to jazz.
He was attracted to people like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery, but his real hero was the legendary pianist, Bill Evans.
Lyle Mays was interested in a few other things in life.
He loved billiards and became quite proficient at it. He loved "angles" and "corners" and he loved to figure out strategies and ways to make shots and beat difficult challenges.
He loved basketball and his Green Bay Packers, and math.
His family was strict and conservative, and as a teenager, Lyle pulled away from convention and the harsh views his father had.
He fell in love with music composition because it freed him, and challenged him to find those "angles"and "corners" he so loved with playing “pool”.
When he was a young kid he was sent to camp. This was a jazz camp.
That’s right.
There was running and jumping and some swimming, but mostly this was a camp for musicians.
The campers played..less sports and much more music.
It was here he had heard about a kid named Pat Metheny, a Lee's Summit, Missouri guitarist and aspiring song writer, who also loved the Beatles, but mostly the same artists Lyle loved.
The two became friends, but then when camp ended, the two went home and went on with their lives..though they did stay in touch by mail and an occasional phone call.
Lyle would move on to jazz contests and competitions, and he would earn first place in many of them.
One night, his hero, the legendary jazz great Bill Evans was in the audience in one of his jazz competitions.
After hearing Lyle play, Evans sent Lyle a note. it said simply.
"Lyle Mays...you are going places."
That note meant more to Lyle than almost anything.
He carried that message in his head and heart for the rest of his life.
Years later, Lyle would attend North Texas State University, one of the great schools for jazz in America, and he got more proficient at composing and playing.
Sometimes he would write and play music for 10-12 hours a day.
He reconnected with his camp mate Pat Metheny and the two decided to record and play music in some sort of jazz band.
Pat attended my alma mater, the University of Miami, but was so gifted on the guitar, the school knew they couldn't teach him much of anything, and offered him a job on the faculty.
Pat was just 18 years old.
He turned down the offer and the suntans in Coral Gables, Florida, and decided to work with Lyle.
There’s a lot of stories of music and musicians and small, crummy gigs on the way, but quickly Lyle and Pat became close friends and devoted composers.
In the late 1970's they decided on a name for their group.
'The Pat Metheny Group'.
Lyle always laughed when he told me, Pat seemed to like that band's title, but Lyle was less about fame and thought they'd come up with another name for the band.
They never did.
From that point on, the PMG became a world class band with world class players.
They'd compose and record on a small label named ECM, but eventually move onto a bigger label with much bigger budgets.
The PMG would tour the world, in perhaps the most grueling tours I'd ever heard of.
I'm talking some 250 -275 dates in a year.
From Stockholm, to Warsaw, to the Czech Republic, to Tokyo, then back to the United States and then to Brazil, and Argentina...and a hundred other concerts and gigs.
It was an unrelenting, demanding and backbreaking schedule.
Pat never owned a home, and Lyle never had time for a long term relationship, let alone a wife.
The two young men and the band would rise to superstardom in the jazz world, which is very, very rare and hard to maintain .
They played with the greatest artists in the world, from Joni Mitchell, to Ornette Coleman, to Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Haden, and dozens of the finest players the jazz world has ever known.
They wrote movie soundtracks and sold millions of albums and all the while kept challenging themselves.
But after decades of all of it, Lyle wanted out.
He had done very well, and earned acclaim and adoration of fans, but he was tired.
Tired of waking up one morning in Morocco, and the next in Prague, and the next day in Osaka, and the next, St. Louis.
He stopped playing music entirely and decided to work on computer software and founded his own computer software company for composing and publishing.
That’s when I got to know Lyle as a friend..not as a celebrity.
I was shocked to hear he stopped playing with no desire to ever play again.
No desire to tour, and no interest in ever seeing another review or reading his name in the paper.
Lyle moved near me and loved to play pool on Thursday nights and work on his software company, and live a quiet, if not "exciting" life.
He just wanted a life that was something simple and manageable. He told me he lost the "love of his life", a woman who tired of his backbreaking touring schedule, and he wanted to try and find his way to a life of normalcy.
He was finding it. Then he got sick, and the other night he died.
I know that Lyle Mays never regretted for a moment, the playing, and was thrilled to compose and record, and electrified by massive audiences who would cheer and appreciate his music.
Once he played before 100,000 fans in a Montreal Jazz Festival.
But I think Lyle came to realize his love of music was greater than the business of music, and so he just quit.
I always felt it was a shame, that the world was robbed of more from a great artist.
But then I realized one day, that was just MY view.
It was HIS life he wanted back.
No more tours.
No more 5 am wake up to make planes or cars calls in someplace he never heard of..waking up not knowing what city he was in..and not caring anyway.
It was all about the music and the art.
His job was never 9 to 5.
He never had to take a bus to get to an office or construction site.
But in a strange way, Lyle Mays wanted quiet, anonymity , something that eluded him for most of his life.
His life ended, sadly, too soon, but he left the world the greatest legacy a musician could ever hope to achieve..he left his music.
Great music that will be loved and admired for decades, maybe a century.
I will miss this man's music.
I'll miss the new friendship we had built.
But I'll really miss the man.
Robbie Robertson of ‘’The Band" once talked of the life of the musician in the film, "The Last Waltz".
He said simply, "It’s an impossible Life".
Lyle led a glorious, productive, creative, and acclaimed life, but in the end..it was an "impossible life".
God what a life it was though.
And Bill Evans was right, he WAS going places.
He went to all of them.