TRACKS

Check out a Quicktime version of cut 2: "Let me Count the Ways" (368K) To get Quicktime, go to: http://quicktime.apple.com Lyle Mays discusses the individual selections on SOLO (Improvisations for Expanded Piano). 1. "This Moment": "This began with kind of a lucky moment, actually. It was the first thing we did in the studio, and could have just been the sound check; as a matter of fact; the computer technician I hired to run the computer wasn't completely ready. But Rob Eaton, our recording engineer, who is so diligent, put the machine into 'Record' and captured it. Afterwards, what we'd thought was going to be a warm-up, or mic check kind of thing turned out to really hang together with musical coherence. We all said, 'Great! We got one!' It was pretty exciting, and also it started this vibe that kind of stayed through the whole session, where everyone got relaxed because I'd already put a good improvisation into the can. So that set a very upbeat tone, which is the best possible environment for improvising. A friend of mine, who's a writer, is an amateur saxophonist. He's written a book of essays on improvisation, and there's a line in his book where he says he approaches jazz as a hobby, but like armed robbery and skydiving, there are various levels of expertise. Improvisation's like those things, too, in that there's always something at stake. To me that's a wonderful description of the tension and the concentration, the kind of high emotional world you enter when you're improvising, especially when it's just you. It's a scary thing for a musician to face an instrument with no idea of what he's going to play and then try to make a piece of music. So getting that first piece on tape, how can I say it — the mood was high in the studio." 2. "Let Me Count The Ways": "It was the first time I'd looked at one of the sketches I'd written out a few days earlier. So I had a melody that was written down, but very little else, none of the form. I just trusted that I could make that up. So I launched into this two-part melodic passage and trusted my instincts to follow what seemed to want to come next. But since the melody had already been sketched, the mood was already in place and it was fairly personal, tender, almost like a love story or a love poem. And I knew that I had to stay true to that mood for the piece to work. So at least I had an emotional map for that one. " 3. "We Are All Alone": "That was in response to a suggestion from Pat. He asked me to play something really long. That gives you no information, there's no theme, no whatever. I set out with the intention of making it a long piece, so I tried to set up more dramatic themes, keeping in the back of my head that we might visit some rather big places. So I was thinking pretty orchestrally and was trying my best to improvise a long piece that still had coherence — that wouldn't ramble. I was kind of straining intellectually to keep in mind what I had previously played and tie it all together. " 4. "The Imperative": "It's whatever it is at the moment you think is the imperative. I think it's almost a joke because it's constantly changing and it's different for different people. This was the last piece I played. Right before I improvised, Pat came on the mic and said, 'I think we got it,' and I said, 'I think there's one thing we don't have.' Which maybe for me was my imperative at that point — something kind of fast and furious. Because I hadn't played anything like that the whole time; I'd played only moody, orchestral, kind of drmatic things, but hadn't attacked the piano, so to speak. There's no orchestration on it, and there are almost too many notes. There's no room for anything else, but I felt that we didn't have that mood represented on the record and it would add to the variety and the completeness. So, I guess my imperative was that we had something that represented that kind of raw, blurted-out energy. " 5. "Procession": "It's more the mood of a procession. Not at the time, but after the fact I got the image of weddings and solemn occasions, things where people move slowly. It could be funerals, too. I'm playing very slowly and deliberately and really trying to think, a split second before it happens, trying to make every note so deliberate, so inevitable. It's a challenge to do when you're improvising, but I was trying to make a piece that seemed written in stone, even though it was being improvised. Again, if I've done my job, people can think of it as a wedding or a funeral or any other occasion that they think would require a procession." 6. "Black Ice": "We had tried a piece before this where I was experimenting with different musical elements like triplets or high register, or whatever. So it was getting very abstract, almost like an improvisation class for actors. You know, 'You're a tea kettle.' But in this piece, the key words are 'really slow.' And what led from that was this kind of glassy image. But, you know, these titles are after the fact. There was nothing specifically related to black ice in my mind while I was playing." 7. "Origami": "It's the opposite of Wagnerian opera, a small art. The piece sounded small to me, like an afterthought. It has elements of 'careful,' 'delicate,' not reaching for grand things. It's content in its smallness." 8. "Lightning Field": "It may be the most dramatic piece on the album. It's certainly orchestrated that way. I was intentionally playing very harshly. I knew that I would come up with the sounds from my bag of tricks that would go with the electricity. I was deliberately smashing dissonant chords, going for electric kinds of effects on this acoustic instrument. So when I got the tapes home I just went for my most brash sounds to orchestrate that one. Again, going back to try to point to what I was thinking of to bring that out." 9. "Locked In Amber": "The title refers to dinosaur DNA, which comes from a very mundane, 'Jurassic Park' sort of notion. But my intent when I started improvising was to keep the entire piece in the low end of the piano. The end result sounded almost ancient to me; it sounded like echoes of things in the past. So we searched for a title seemed to reflect that." 10. "Long Life": "This piece is the exception to the approach taken on the album. It was written in, I believe, 1976 or '77, in Dallas, when I was down visiting some friends. We got some free recording time and for fun went into the studio, so it's a part of my distant past, a piece that had never found a home. I had the idea that I could do an all-keyboard version of it with various elements of different pianos functioning as the rhythm section. The vibrato on the Rhodes was essentially the drums. Everything that's in the rhythm section was taken from what the original piano part plays. So that was kind of an attempt to make a band just out of pianos. Then I orchestrated some other string kinds of sounds around it, doubled the melody, things like that. More like a conventional recording. "