“Right from the start, one of the major tenets of the group was that we wanted to go beyond song-form type material whenever we could.”
—Pat Metheny
Pat Metheny is one of the most intriguing musicians of the past four decades. As a solo artist and also as a part of the Pat Metheny Group, he continues to defy musical categories. He has been called one of the most influential people in jazz music, but that doesn’t capture his impact. His style of blending musical genres has impacted most aspects of music that people enjoy today.
Pat Metheny was born on August 12, 1954, in Kansas City and grew up in the suburb of Lee’s Summit. His family exposed him to a wide variety of musical influences as a child, which made a huge impact on his development. He played trumpet at age 8 and then switched his focus to guitar at 12. He proved to be such an adept musician that he was playing with some of the best musical groups in Kansas City as a teen.
Unlike many musicians who finally get stage experience in their twenties, Metheny was already a stage veteran in his teens. By the age of eighteen, he was already teaching classes at the University of Miami to students much older than him. Not only was he the youngest teacher in history at the Florida university, he also became the youngest teacher at Boston’s Berklee College of Music at age nineteen.
At age twenty, he was already well known in musical circles, but he did not have household name recognition. He spent the next three years touring with Gary Burton and playing for packed houses all over the country while releasing small solo albums. The exposure as a backup artist expanded his horizons and gave Metheny the experience he needed to move to the next level: the frontman of a band. He released his first solo album Bright Size Life in 1975 and began a “constant musical tour” that has consumed his life over the past thirty years.
Metheny Group in 1977.
Part of his unconventional approach to music was to add instruments that weren’t normally associated with jazz. That included the 12-string guitar, the guitar synthesizer, and the forty-two-string Pikasso guitar. The unusual sounds helped him develop an immense following. The band was releasing an album nearly every year since the mid-1970s to keep their fans happy.
Metheny and The Pat Metheny Group continue to churn out albums in the 2000s. He is one of the most resilient and biggest selling artists over the past three decades. That puts him on the top of the list as one of Missouri’s greatest entertainers ever.
*His older brother, Mike Metheny, is also a professional musician.
*Pat received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music.
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