Pat Metheny is probably the most charismatic Jazz guitarist of recent decades, with a faithful audience always ready to embrace his latest projects, one of the brightest stars of the Jazz community. Metheny reinvents the Jazz guitar sound using new technologies and works tirelessly to evolve the instrument’s potential. His versatility is peerless; he has composed for solo guitar, large orchestras, ballet pieces and small ensembles, with settings ranging from rock to classical music and including, needless to say, the most innovative contemporary Jazz.
He has countless distinctions and accolades to his name, particularly including his 20 Grammy Awards in 12 different categories, the only musician to have achieved such a feat. And with the Pat Metheny Group, his acclaimed and influential band founded in 1977, the North American guitarist landed an unprecedented 7 consecutive Grammys....
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Pat Metheny is probably the most charismatic Jazz guitarist of recent decades, with a faithful audience always ready to embrace his latest projects, one of the brightest stars of the Jazz community. Metheny reinvents the Jazz guitar sound using new technologies and works tirelessly to evolve the instrument’s potential. His versatility is peerless; he has composed for solo guitar, large orchestras, ballet pieces and small ensembles, with settings ranging from rock to classical music and including, needless to say, the most innovative contemporary Jazz.
He has countless distinctions and accolades to his name, particularly including his 20 Grammy Awards in 12 different categories, the only musician to have achieved such a feat. And with the Pat Metheny Group, his acclaimed and influential band founded in 1977, the North American guitarist landed an unprecedented 7 consecutive Grammys.
Pat Metheny was born in Kansas City in 1954 into a musical family, so it’s no surprise that he started on the trumpet at the age of 8 before switching to guitar aged 12. By the age of 15 he was working regularly with the best Jazz musicians in Kansas City, receiving vast on-the-bandstand experience at an unusually young age. Metheny burst onto the international scene in 1974, fresh into his 20th year. Over the course of his three-year stint with vibraphone great Gary Burton he forged his trademark playing style, blending loose and flexible articulation with advanced rhythmic and harmonic sensibility, a way of playing and improvising that was modern in its conception, yet grounded deeply in the Jazz and blues he had been raised on in Kansas City.
During his career Metheny has played and worked with very different artists such as Steve Reich, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall, Milton Nascimento, David Bowie, Lyle Mays and John Zorn.
Metheny is also a music educator. At only 19 he became the youngest teacher ever at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music, where he received an honorary doctorate in 1996. He has taught all over the world, from academies in Asia and South America to the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.
Metheny has spent most of his life on tour, averaging 120 and 240 shows a year since 1974. He continues to drive his career with the same enthusiasm as the first day, dedicating time to his own artistic vision while helping emerging artists to reach their audience.
For this concert at the Kursaal Auditorium, Metheny will present his project Side-Eye, a group that took its first steps with his live album Side-Eye NYC – (V1.IV) (2021) and which provides a platform for hosting and supporting a rotating cast of new generations of musicians, a rotating group of musicians who have the option to come and go and who play new pieces while reinterpreting Pat Metheny’s older compositions.
The iconic guitarist wants today’s young musicians to enjoy the same support that he received from hallowed musicians, in his own words: “From my earliest days in Kansas City, I was the beneficiary of so many musicians who engaged me, which gave me the opportunity to develop through their experiences and the particular demands of their music”.
With his boundless creative energy on a never-ending journey of musical discovery, one of Metheny’s defining characteristics is the constant level of commitment and quality that he puts into everything he does. Whether emphatically electric, powerfully intense or deeply contemplative, performing compositions or in totally improvised format, or even with the odd innovative artifact of his own design, his music always bears the Metheny stamp of unmistakable sensitivity brought to us by this leading light of the Jazz world for almost five decades. Side-Eye is the latest chapter in his long and successful career, always in continuous development.
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