Collection: Pat Metheny

Pat Metheny arrived fully formed. His 1976 ECM debut, "Bright Size Life", recorded when he was 21 with Jaco Pastorius on bass and Bob Moses on drums, announced a guitarist with a sound that was immediately his own: wide open, harmonically rich, rooted in the American Midwest rather than the urban bop tradition. He had come through Gary Burton's quartet and a stint teaching at Berklee before any of this, but none of that institutional background made him cautious. The ECM years that followed produced some of his most searching work, including the double album "80/81" (1980), which brought together Michael Brecker, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman and Jack DeJohnette in a post-bop session that remains one of the label's finest. His Pat Metheny Group records, beginning with the self-titled 1978 debut, took things somewhere else entirely: Latin rhythms, synthesisers, a euphoric melodicism that sold well and still holds up. Then came "Song X" in 1986, recorded with Ornette Coleman, which confounded everyone who thought they had him figured out. ECM pressings from this period are the core of what you'll find here, alongside later Geffen and Nonesuch material.