Lyle David Mays (November 27, 1953 – February 10, 2020) was an American jazzpianist, composer, and member of the Pat Metheny Group. Metheny and Mays composed and arranged nearly all of the group’s music, for which Mays won eleven Grammy Awards.

Mays composed, orchestrated, and arranged as a core member of the Pat Metheny Group, playing piano, organ, synthesizers and, occasionally, trumpet, accordion, agogô bells, autoharp, toy xylophone, and electric guitar. He also composed, performed, and recorded dramatic scores for children’s audiobooks, such as East of the Sun, West of the Moon, with text narrated by Max von Sydow; Moses the Lawgiver, told by Ben Kingsley; The Lion and the Lamb, narrated by Amy Grant and Christopher Reeve; and The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher and Tale of Peter Rabbit, read by Meryl Streep. In 1985, Metheny’s and Mays’s compositions were performed by the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in the critically acclaimed production of Orphans by Lyle Kessler. Lyle’s Oberheim analog synth pad and his voice counting the second hand of a clock at the recording session, “55…, 3..,” which can be heard from the bridge part of “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (1981),” was used for Christian Dior’s Fahrenheit Cologne commercials for almost 30 years, from 1988 to 2016.

Mays was regarded by both professional musicians and music fans as one of the most innovative and creative jazz pianists and keyboardists, but he considered himself more of a serious contemporary composer with an advanced approach to classical music, harmonic aesthetics, and structural development through long forms. He composed several contemporary classical pieces, such as “Twelve Days in the Shadow of a Miracle”, a piece for harp, flute, viola, and synthesizer recorded in 1996 by the Debussy Trio. Mays also composed “Distance” for Pat Metheny Group’s Grammy-winning and RIAA-certified Gold album, Still Life (Talking)(1987, Geffen), “Mindwalk” in 2009 for marimba player Nancy Zeltsman, and previously “Somewhere in Maine” in 1988 for her duo with violinist Sharan Leventhal, Marimolin, and “Street Dreams 3” for his solo album, Street Dreams (Geffen, 1988) with top classical performers in New York City.

Mays died in Los Angeles at the age of 66 on February 10, 2020, “after a long battle with a recurring illness”.

Mays was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards in 2022 for his composition “Eberhard,” dedicated to the German double bassist and composer, Eberhard Weber.