Work
In the Pat Metheny Group, Mays provides arrangements, orchestration and the harmonic and metric backbone of the group's musical signature. He occasionally performs on electric guitar as well. On the song Forward March, from the Pat Metheny Group album First Circle (1984), and in the concert tour for that album, he played trumpet.
His albums as a leader reflect a large variety of musical interests: Lyle Mays and Street Dreams build on the content of the Pat Metheny Group, while Fictionary is a straight-ahead jazz trio session featuring fellow North Texan Marc Johnson on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Solo: Improvisations for Expanded Piano is focused on solo piano improvisations.
He has also composed and recorded music for children's records, such as Tale of Peter Rabbit, with text read by Meryl Streep.
The Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago featured an assortment of compositions by Lyle Mays and Pat Metheny for their production of Lyle Kessler's play Orphans.
He has composed classical music such as "Twelve Days in the Shadow of a Miracle", a piece for harp, flute, viola and synthesizer (recorded 1996 by the Debussy Trio).
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.”
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“The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
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