ALBUM

"For this record, " says Lyle Mays of his new album SOLO (Improvisations for Expanded Piano), "I decided it had to be a mixture of electronics, computer, synthesizer and grand piano. It couldn't be a solo piano album. That wouldn't be an honest statement." What is an honest statement is to say that SOLO, recorded over the course of two-and-a-half days in August 1998 (and Mays' fourth disc under his own name), is also a most audacious melding of improvisation and composition of the sounds and musical traditions that have shaped — and now have been re-shaped by — the multi-keyboardist/composer. It is a work whose depth, subtlety and complexity (particularly in its harmonic language) will engage the most sophisticated ear, yet it offers more than enough melodic content and, especially, dramatic uses of natural and synthetic sounds to reach Everyman (and woman). And from a purely pianistic standpoint, Mays has never sounded more commanding. "For my entire career," Mays continues, "I've been working with merging acoustic and electric, piano and synthesizer, classical and jazz. So I hit on the idea of recording an album of pieces for the MIDI piano, recording the MIDI data for the computer, improvising these pieces and then orchestrating them after the fact, which I've never heard anyone do before." And in Conclusion: "The thing I'm most proud of is that I was able to improvise these pieces that play back like compositions. There's no vamping, no hesitation; it's pretty fearless, like jumping into the next lake, or whatever. There doesn?t seem to be any holes in the flow of thought, which is kind of hard to do. I'm not trying to just play jazz. I'm actually trying to compose a piece of music in real time. "One of the things Pat said to me on the first day we were in the studio, after I'd played a couple of pieces, was 'Yeah, do some more of that stuff where I don't have a clue as to what chord you're playing.' He got that it was complex, harmonically, that I was trying to stake out my own harmonic language. It's the most honest thing I've ever recorded; it shows me on piano and with the synths, and shows me thinking about music and composing. It's the most personal statement I could have made, given what I've been pursuing; yet its forces are equivalent to a symphony orchestra. It's jazz in the most theoretical sense; it's improvisation, the cornerstone of jazz. But I'm not sure if it sounds like improvisation. I'm trying to create little sonatas and little tone poems, and at times big tone poems, smash-the-tympani kinds of tone poems. The intent is not the one of most jazz. It's the self-expression more of a composer than a player."