Guitar | b. 1954

Few jazz guitarists have sustained a career as stylistically restless as Pat Metheny's. Born in Lee's Summit, Missouri in 1954, he developed a tone that drew from country and folk as readily as from bebop, giving his playing an open-air quality unlike anything in the mainstream jazz guitar tradition. His early ECM recordings set the template: lyrical but harmonically sophisticated, capable of quiet introspection and rhythmic urgency in the same breath. "Bright Size Life" (ECM, 1976), cut with Jaco Pastorius and Bob Moses, remains a landmark of the label's output, and "80/81" (ECM, 1980) confirmed his credentials as a serious jazz musician alongside Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman, Michael Brecker, and Jack DeJohnette. His Pat Metheny Group work, developed throughout the 1980s with keyboardist Lyle Mays, brought Brazilian rhythms and electronic textures into a commercial fusion format that never felt compromised. His 1986 collaboration with Ornette Coleman, "Song X" (Geffen), remains his most provocative record.