Guitarist Pat Metheny was born August 12, 1954 in Lee’s Summit, Missouri and has gone on to record three gold albums and win twenty Grammy awards in twelve different categories. He is the only person to have achieved that feat.

Pat Metheny, younger brother of flugelhornist Mike Metheny, began playing trumpet at the age of 8 and took up the guitar at 12. When Pat was 15 he won a DownBeat Magazine scholarship to jazz camp and was already playing gigs around Kansas City. At 18 he was a student at the University of Miami and was teaching there shortly after arriving. At 19 he became the youngest teacher ever at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and was working with bassist Jaco Pastorius. The following year he began a three-year stint with vibraphonist Gary Burton.

The 1976 album “Bright Size Life” on ECM Records was Metheny’s first as a leader and preceded the formation of the Pat Metheny Group by a year. That group’s first album in 1978, with Metheny on guitar, Lyle Mays playing keyboards, bassist Mark Egan and with Danny Gottlieb at the drums, immediately sold more than 100,000 copies and remained on the Billboard jazz album chart for more than a year. The Pat Metheny Group won an impressive seven consecutive Grammys for seven consecutive albums.

During the past four decades Pat Metheny has continued to lead his group although the personnel has changed over time. He has also dedicated time to other projects with musicians like Charlie Haden, Dave Holland, Ornette Coleman, Joni Mitchell, Jim Hall and Michael Brecker.

Here is a link to The Pat Metheny Group in a live performance in 1991 in Lisbon, Portugal. They’re playing Phase Dance from their first album:

"PHASE DANCE"