Pat Metheny
A man who tried to carry Missouri's wide skies and endless roads into a single guitar.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Collaborators ⏳🌊
- FamilyMike Metheny
The older brother who first put a trumpet in his hands and brought Miles Davis records into the house, leading him toward jazz.
- InfluenceWes Montgomery
The idol whose “Smokin' at the Half Note” the teenage Metheny played until it wore thin, learning from it how a guitar could sing.
- MentorGary Burton
He brought the nineteen-year-old to Berklee as an instructor and, taking him into his own band, opened the door to the professional stage.
- ColleagueJaco Pastorius
A bassist three years his senior whom he met in Miami; together on the debut “Bright Size Life” they opened a new path for the bass.
- ColleagueLyle Mays
His lifelong musical partner, writing music with him for nearly 30 years from 1977 on and shaping the sound of the Pat Metheny Group together.
- InfluenceOrnette Coleman
The free-jazz pioneer he had admired since his teens; in 1985 they finally recorded together on “Song X.”
I. The boy from Lee's Summit · 1954–1971 (age 0–17)
(Birth) Born in August 1954 in Kansas City, Missouri, the second son of Dave and Lois, he grew up in Lee's Summit, a small town southeast of Kansas City. The wide plains and railroad tracks, the small-town scenes of summer nights, would return again and again in his song titles and melodies. (Trumpet) Music was part of daily life at home. His father played trumpet too, and his older brother Mike grew into a trumpet and flugelhorn player. Around the age of eight, Pat followed his brother and took up the trumpet first. The brothers stayed bound by music all their lives, and Mike later worked on the Kansas City jazz scene as both a player and a writer. (Turning point) Around twelve, amid Beatlemania, he got his hands on a guitar. At about the same time, as he has recalled many times, hearing Miles Davis's live album “Four & More,” which his brother had brought home, tipped him toward jazz in a single stroke. Then, playing Wes Montgomery's “Smokin' at the Half Note” until it wore thin, he learned by ear the warm, thumb-plucked tone and the endlessly flowing solos. (Kansas City) From his mid-teens he played with older musicians in the clubs of Kansas City, the city that gave the world Count Basie and Charlie Parker. He learned more on the stage at night than in school. The Midwestern diligence ingrained in those years, along with a feel for spinning out a melody as if singing it, became the foundation of his music.
II. The nineteen-year-old professor · 1972–1976 (age 18–22)
(Miami) After finishing high school in 1972, he entered the University of Miami on a scholarship. But the classroom did not suit him. Having heard him play, the school instead offered him a teaching post, and he stayed on not as a student but as a teacher. There he met Jaco Pastorius, a bassist three years his senior, and in 1974 he recorded with Jaco for the first time, alongside pianist Paul Bley. (Burton) Vibraphonist Gary Burton is said to have first heard him at a jazz festival in Wichita. Through Burton's help, in 1973 he became an instructor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, at nineteen the youngest member of its faculty at the time. The following year he joined Burton's band, recording “Ring,” “Dreams So Real,” and “Passengers” with Steve Swallow and Mick Goodrick. On his elder's bandstand he learned how to lead a band and how to live on the road. (Debut) In December 1975 he recorded his first album as a leader, “Bright Size Life,” produced by Manfred Eicher, head of the German label ECM. It was a trio with Jaco and drummer Bob Moses. The song titles held the names of towns near his hometown and the Midwestern night, and for the final track he chose a piece by Ornette Coleman, whom he had long admired. The first record by a twenty-one-year-old living on an instructor's salary would come to be read as something like a textbook of jazz guitar.
The first album by a twenty-one-year-old instructor, made with Jaco, three years his senior. Hometown place names and the Midwestern night seep into every song title.
- On the title track, Jaco's bass without frets (the metal strips the strings are pressed against) does more than hold down the beat beneath the guitar; it sings melody alongside it. This is the moment the bass rises from accompanist to conversation partner.
- The guitar tone is round and clear, free of distortion, and a device that repeats the sound a moment later (delay) makes its resonance seem to bleed into the space. This tone would become Metheny's signature.
- Rather than packing the beats tightly, Bob Moses's drums leave open space, stirring the air with cymbals, so the give-and-take among the three (interplay) comes through clearly.
- The final track is a medley joining two Ornette Coleman tunes, already revealing the reverence for Ornette that would later lead to “Song X.”
- Recorded in December 1975 in Ludwigsburg, Germany, produced by Manfred Eicher. ECM's characteristic transparent, deep sense of space brings out the trio's delicate sound.
III. Birth of the group · 1977–1984 (age 23–30)
(Mays) On the 1977 album “Watercolors” he first recorded with Wisconsin-born pianist Lyle Mays. The two went on to write music together for nearly 30 years. In 1978, with bassist Mark Egan and drummer Danny Gottlieb, he released the first Pat Metheny Group album. (The road) At first the group crisscrossed the United States in a single van, playing hundreds of shows a year. In 1979 “American Garage” reached the top of the jazz charts. That same year he joined Joni Mitchell's tour with Mays, Jaco, and Michael Brecker, preserved in the concert film “Shadows and Light.” (Expansion) He moved within the current of fusion, which blended the sounds of jazz and rock, but never settled into any one camp. On 1980's “80/81” he stretched out in straight-ahead jazz improvisation with Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, Dewey Redman, and Brecker, and in 1981, with Mays and Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, he made the lyrical “As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls.” (Synthesizer) On 1982's “Offramp” he took up the guitar synthesizer in earnest. The device, which draws horn-like sounds from guitar strings, became his emblem, and the album brought him his first Grammy. With 1983's “Rejoicing,” playing Ornette Coleman tunes with Haden and Billy Higgins, and 1984's “First Circle,” with drummer Paul Wertico newly on board, he closed out his ECM years.
The album in which a group seasoned on the road found a new voice in the guitar synthesizer. It brought him his first Grammy.
- “Are You Going with Me?” builds slowly over the same rhythmic pattern repeating quietly beneath it. After an opening melody that sounds like a harmonica, Metheny's guitar-synthesizer solo starts low and widens its range in a long climb.
- The guitar synthesizer reads the vibration of the guitar strings and turns it into a horn-like sound. Its tone, like a long-drawn breath, gives the sense of reaching beyond the limits of the guitar.
- The title track, “Offramp,” is a rough, headlong improvisation that breaks free of set harmonic frameworks, a passage where Ornette Coleman's influence surfaces within the group sound.
- Naná Vasconcelos's voice and percussion lend an earthy texture to the lyrical pieces.
IV. Ornette and Brazil · 1985–1992 (age 31–38)
(Geffen) In 1985 he moved to Geffen Records in the United States. That same year he and Mays scored the film “The Falcon and the Snowman,” and its theme song, “This Is Not America,” sung by David Bowie, climbed high on the British charts. It was a rare moment of a jazz guitarist standing at the center of popular music. (Ornette) That December he recorded “Song X” with Ornette Coleman, whom he is known to have admired since his teens. Haden, DeJohnette, and Ornette's son Denardo Coleman joined them. The project, which embraced head-on Ornette's approach of placing harmony·rhythm·melody on equal footing and letting each player move freely (harmolodics), startled his fans. Standing beside the idol of his youth is said to have meant a great deal to him. (Brazil) His frequent trips to Brazil in the 1980s, spent among musicians there such as Milton Nascimento, seeped into 1987's “Still Life (Talking)” and 1989's “Letter from Home.” Wordless vocal choruses and the sway of 6/8 time became the group's new face, and both albums won Grammys. (Exchanges) In 1989 he recorded the trio album “Question and Answer” with Dave Holland and Roy Haynes, and in 1990 he toured as part of “Parallel Realities” with Herbie Hancock, DeJohnette, and Holland. On 1992's “Secret Story” he wove together an orchestra and recordings of a Cambodian royal choir, unfolding his broadest canvas outside the framework of the group.
The record of his long-awaited meeting with Ornette Coleman, his idol since his teenage years. It startled listeners who had expected a lyrical guitarist.
- “Endangered Species” storms on without pause for more than 13 minutes. Metheny's guitar synthesizer swirls in the upper register while the two drummers, Jack DeJohnette and Denardo Coleman, collide head-on.
- On the theme, where Ornette's alto saxophone and Metheny's guitar sing the same line together (unison), the two instruments merge like a single voice.
- Ornette's approach, in which each player shifts the harmony by following the melody rather than being bound to a set chord progression (harmolodics), drives the whole record. At the center of that chaos, Charlie Haden's bass holds everything firmly in place.
- The 2005 20th-anniversary edition adds six previously unreleased tracks at the front, showing the breadth of the original sessions more fully.
The album in which the rhythms and voices he heard traveling to and from Brazil became the group's new face. The lyricism of the American Midwest and the sway of South America blend into one.
- In 「Last Train Home」 Paul Wertico keeps a rhythm like the wheels of a train going from start to finish with bristled sticks (brushes). Over it rides an electric-guitar melody that imitates the sound of the Indian sitar, giving the sense of a long road traveled.
- In 「Minuano (Six Eight)」 a wordless vocal choir carries the melody over a meter (6/8) that divides each bar into six beats swaying in twos. From the midpoint on, repeated rhythms pile up layer upon layer and the music swells.
- The arranging, which uses voices like instruments rather than for words, comes from the influence of Brazilian music and makes the group's sound warmer and wider.
- Lyle Mays's keyboards lay down long-held chords and fill the space as if painting the sky in the background.
V. The widening map · 1993–2005 (age 39–51)
(Experiment) In 1994 he released 「Zero Tolerance for Silence」, alone, layering electric guitar upon electric guitar until the record was filled with something close to noise. It was a work in which he himself shook up his image as a lyrical guitarist, and the response is said to have been mixed. Yet the group's 「We Live Here」 the following year and 「Imaginary Day」 in 1997 each won a Grammy, and the group carried on. (Haden) He shared a special bond with Charlie Haden, who came from the same rural Missouri. 「Beyond the Missouri Sky」, recorded by the two as a duo in 1996, paints the fields and skies of home in slow melodies, and Metheny built up layers of sound through overdubbing, recording several guitars one over another. (Peers) On 1998's 「Like Minds」 he sat down together with his old teacher Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Roy Haynes. In 1999 he formed a guitar trio with Larry Grenadier and Bill Stewart and returned to straight-ahead jazz improvisation. In 1996 he received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music, where he had once taught. (Magnum opus) In 2002 he rebuilt the group around drummer Antonio Sánchez and trumpeter Cuong Vu, and in 2004 he moved to the Nonesuch label. 2005's 「The Way Up」 was a single-piece album nearly seventy minutes long. Of this work, which varies a handful of short figures (motifs) all the way to the end, he is known to have explained it as a response to an era in which music was growing short and light. It became the last group album he made with Lyle Mays.
A duo album with Charlie Haden, who grew up in the same rural Missouri, painting the fields of home in slow melodies. It won a Grammy.
- In Ennio Morricone's film score 「Cinema Paradiso」 the two concentrate on singing the melody itself rather than on dazzling improvisation.
- Haden's bass lets each note ring long, with almost no vibrato. You can clearly hear his way of speaking — building a deep floor out of few notes.
- Metheny layered several guitars, acoustic among them, in multiple recordings (overdubbing), so that the duo at times sounds like a small ensemble.
- The tempos are mostly slow and the breaths long. The unhurried playing calls to mind the stillness of wide skies and plains.
A single-piece magnum opus made as a response to music being consumed in ever shorter, lighter forms. It is the last group album he made with Lyle Mays.
- A single piece of nearly seventy minutes is divided into an opening and three parts. It was designed to be heard straight through from beginning to end.
- A few short figures (motifs) are transformed endlessly as their rhythm and harmony shift. It is rewarding to follow how a fragment that flits past early on grows into a great theme later.
- Grégoire Maret's harmonica and Cuong Vu's trumpet trade the melody with the guitar, broadening the colors of the group's sound.
- Antonio Sánchez's drumming never breaks the flow, even in intricate passages where the meter keeps changing, and serves as the backbone of the long piece.
VI. Machines and old friends · 2006–2026 (age 52–72)
(Encounters) In 2006 he released duo and quartet albums with pianist Brad Mehldau. On 2010's 「Orchestrion」 he arrayed electrically driven pianos, marimbas, drums and more across the stage and led them alone on guitar. He explained that it was a dream that began with the player piano at his grandfather's house when he was a child. The following year he released a solo album of old pop songs played on a baritone guitar, tuned lower than an ordinary guitar. (Unity) In 2012 he formed the Unity Band with saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist Ben Williams and Sánchez, and won a Grammy once again. In 2013 he was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame, only the fourth guitarist after Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery. In 2018 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts. (Farewells) One by one his old friends departed. Charlie Haden died in 2014, and in February 2020 Lyle Mays died. Metheny honored Mays as one of the greatest musicians he had ever known. Eleven days later 「From This Place」, recorded with an orchestra, came out, but the pandemic soon brought the tour to a halt. (Now) He did not stop. In 2021 he released 「Side-Eye」 with young players and 「Road to the Sun」, a collection of works for classical guitar, and in 2023 and 2024 the solo-recorded 「Dream Box」 and 「MoonDial」. His Grammy wins have reached twenty. Keeping his family life almost entirely private, he still tours the stages with a single guitar, now past seventy.
A work that realized a dream begun with the player piano at his grandfather's house in childhood. A mechanical band led by a single guitar.
- Pianos, marimbas, drums, glass bottles and other electrically driven instruments play alongside Metheny's guitar. The accompaniment, taken over by machines instead of people, sounds astonishingly precise and yet alive.
- The title track runs over fifteen minutes. While the machines build up their woven patterns, the guitar solo cuts its own free path above them.
- With his guitar and foot pedals Metheny summons and silences the machines in real time. So even the same piece flows a little differently from one performance to the next.
- Recorded with the mechanical instruments set out in a real space, so that each instrument's position and resonance can be felt separately.
Lesser-known stories
「Orchestrion」 looked like an eccentric mechanical experiment, but its roots lay in childhood. In many interviews Metheny named as the starting point of the project his memory of being enchanted by the player piano in the basement of his grandfather's house in Wisconsin. The actual devices were built in collaboration with, among others, the team of Eric Singer, an engineer who makes musical robots. Because the album's promotion put the technical spectacle first, the fact that the project was a childhood dream decades in the making remained comparatively little known. The Pikasso guitar he commissioned around 1984 from the Canadian luthier Linda Manzer is an unusual instrument with forty-two strings and four necks. Manzer recalled that Metheny wanted as many strings as possible, and building it is said to have taken nearly a year. The instrument appears on 「Imaginary Day」 and on his recordings with Haden, among others, but since he rarely brings it out on stage, its story is told mostly among instrument enthusiasts. Though he never finished a university degree, he was already teaching at the college level in his late teens. The anecdote that, when he confessed as a student at the University of Miami that he could not keep up with his classes, the school instead offered him a teaching post is known from his own recollection. When Berklee later awarded him an honorary doctorate, it was in effect belatedly granting a degree to a man who had once been its youngest faculty member.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Fusion
(Meaning) Fusion means melting things (from Latin fundere, to pour·to melt) and joining them into one. (In jazz) A current, from around the 1970s, that mixed jazz improvisation with the electric instruments and strong rhythms of rock, and at times with funk or Latin music. Electric guitar and synthesizer play a large part. Just as bibimbap mixes many seasoned vegetables in one bowl to create a new flavor, it blends the ingredients of different musics into a new taste. (Elsewhere) In cooking it refers to fusion cuisine that mixes the foods of different countries; in science, to nuclear fusion, in which atomic nuclei combine.
Guitar synthesizer
(Meaning) A synthesizer is a machine that synthesizes (synthesis) — that is, an instrument that synthesizes and produces sound electrically. (In jazz) An instrument in which a device reads the vibration of the guitar strings and turns it into synthesizer sound. The player plays the guitar as usual, but what comes out can sound like a trumpet or an organ. It is like using the same controller to steer an entirely different character in a game. The hands play guitar, but the voice becomes another instrument.
Harmolodics
(Meaning) A word coined by Ornette Coleman, said to fuse harmony, movement and melody. (In jazz) Ornette's way of making music: instead of everyone following a fixed chord progression, each player follows the melody, shifting key and harmony freely while responding to one another. No one of harmony, rhythm or melody is master; all are equal. Like friends spinning a story on the spot with no script, when one person turns in a new direction, the others turn with them right then and there.
Overdubbing
(Meaning) A blend of over ('on top') and dubbing ('laying on'), meaning to lay new sound over sound already recorded. (In jazz) A technique of listening to a performance recorded earlier while recording another instrument, or the same one, on top of it, so that the parts overlap. A single player can create the sound of many people playing. It works on the same principle as recording yourself singing several times and layering the takes into a one-person choir video. (Elsewhere) In film, dubbing means replacing an actor's voice with another voice or another language.
Motif
(Meaning) Motif comes from the Latin movere, 'to set in motion.' It is the small seed that sets a whole work in motion. (In jazz) A short melodic or rhythmic fragment of just a few notes. The composer raises or lowers it, stretches or shrinks it, and grows an entire piece from it. Just as you can build a house or a ship from a single kind of Lego brick, one small fragment can raise a large structure. (Elsewhere) In art and literature, it refers to an element or theme that recurs throughout a work.
Baritone guitar
(Meaning) Baritone comes from the Greek for 'heavy' (barys) 'sound' (tonos). It is also the name for the male voice lower than the tenor in a choir. (In jazz) A guitar with a longer neck and heavier strings than an ordinary guitar, tuned several notes lower. Its sound rings deeper and darker. It is like a choir in which a low baritone, instead of a high soprano, sings the same song and the mood grows calm. Metheny has released several solo albums on this guitar, quietly playing old songs.