Pat Metheny Side-Eye III+

It’s rare for a musician to win one Grammy Award in a career. To have won 20, spread over categories including Best Rock Instrumental, Best Contemporary Jazz Recording, Best Instrumental Solo, and Best Instrumental Composition, is amazing. If you’ve won seven consecutive Grammy Awards for seven consecutive albums, you’re guitarist Pat Metheny, only the fourth guitarist to be included in the Downbeat Hall of Fame.

A native of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, Metheny started playing the trumpet at 8. He switched to the guitar as a teen and by 15 was working with the best jazz musicians in Kansas City. He burst onto the international jazz scene in 1974 and spent three years with vibraphone great Gary Burton. Even as a young man, he had already shown his trademark playing style, a way of playing and improvising that was modern and yet grounded in the jazz tradition of melody, swing, and the blues. With the release of his first album, Bright Size Life, Metheny reinvented the traditional jazz guitar sound for a new generation. Throughout his career, he has continued to redefine the genre with innovative uses of emerging technology that expands the potential of his instrument.

Metheny is known for his versatility. Over the years, he has performed with artists as diverse as Steve Reich, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall, Milton Nascimento and David Bowie. His body of work includes compositions for solo guitar, small ensembles, electric and acoustic instruments, large orchestras, ballet, and the robotic instruments of his Orchestrion project, always sidestepping the limits of any one genre.

In addition to being an accomplished musician, Metheny is a music educator. At 18, he was the youngest teacher at the University of Miami. At 19, he became the youngest teacher at the Berklee College of Music, from which he received an honorary doctorate more than 20 years later. He has taught music workshops all over the world and is a pioneer in the realm of electronic music, one of the first to treat the synthesizer as a serious musical instrument.

In 2020, Metheny released a new album, From This Place, which features 10 compositions by him. It is, he said, a work for which he has waited a long time. “From This Place is one of the records I have been waiting to make my whole life,” he said. “It is kind of a musical culmination, reflecting a wide range of expressions that have interested me over the years, scaled across a large canvas, presented in a way that offers the kind of opportunities for communication that can only be earned with a group of musicians who have spent hundreds of nights together on the bandstand.”

Shortly after its release, Metheny launched a new playing environment called “Side-Eye.” “From my earliest days in Kansas City, I was the beneficiary of so many older musicians giving me a platform to develop my thing through the prism of their experience and the particular demands of what their music implied. I have been feeling like I wanted to have a specific platform to focus on some of the younger musicians I have enjoyed recently who I have felt some kind of a kinship with. I wanted to create an ongoing setting to feature a rotating cast of new and upcoming musicians who have particularly caught my interest along the way.”

In 2024, Metheny released MoonDial, a combination of original and covered works including Chick Corea’s “You’re Everything” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story. Chris May of All About Jazz described it as “lyrical, nuanced, and beautiful, as lovely as a flower, it is designed to make ears smile.”

You don’t have to be Irish to have smiling ears.