Preview
BILL MAYS
Saturday, December 13
Banff Centre
Monday, December 15
University Theatre
(University of Calgary)
What do Frank Zappa, whales and wolves have in common? Jazz pianist Bill Mays has played for all of them.
Mays, whose career credits include accompanist for Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra and collaborations with major classical orchestras, has a long musical history. Mays was 15 at the time he saw jazz piano legend Earl Hines and famed jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. For Mays, just starting his career as a pianist, it was Hines that changed everything, setting Mays firmly in the jazz world.
"It was Hines’s use of the whole keyboard – his uncanny way of playing stride piano, it was totally his own," Mays says. "It was not orthodox and as I listen now, knowing all that I know, it still intrigues me."
Taking his cues from that, Mays has led his career down an interesting path. As he describes his work with composer-musician Paul Winter, Mays laughs.
"My work with Paul Winter was interesting," he says, "because I got to play some of those pieces he had written where you’re actually accompanying a whale or a wolf."
Some would say this is true to form for Mays – even though he’s also known as an accomplished pianist, composer and arranger, his work has always challenged his listeners and his fellow musicians.
"I draw from a lot of different wells," says Mays, "and certainly my classical background figures into my playing – my improvising." One such well was Mays’s work with the legendary Frank Zappa, performing in a piece which featured clavinets, light shows and what Mays refers to as electronic alterations.
"It was amazing for its scope and the fact that it really wasn’t a pop work," says Mays." It was serious – Frank was a serious composer."
Serious composition and its potential for improvisation intrigues Mays. Throughout his career he has explored classical compositions by Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi and Mendelssohn and worked with the Lucerne Chamber Festival and Branford Marsalis and the New Jersey Philharmonic.
For Mays, the technical abilities of these partners was a huge attraction "I think it’s broadened me as a player," he says. "What I like about those collaborations is it’s great music. Those pieces are wonderful pieces in and of themselves, but it’s fun… to take the material and try to figure out what the changes are – what the harmonic changes are – and simply boil them down to chord symbols so that we can then improvise on the themes."
Mays continues this tradition in his upcoming Calgary performance of "A Jazzy Nutcracker Suite," a work based on original composition and arrangements inspired by Ravel, Debussy and Tchaikovsky. The all-star performance, scheduled as a fundraiser for the Calgary Ups and Downs Society for children with Down’s Syndrome, will feature some of the best musicians on the Canadian jazz scene including Terry Clarke, Neil Swainson, John Johnson, Phil Dwyer and Perry White.
Like Mays’s other works, A Jazzy Nutcracker is an unorthodox creation, a clear example of his unique approach to composition, arrangement and performance. Fitting then that, like his own assessment of Earl Hines, many listeners would also describe Bill Mays as having a style that is totally his own. |
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