Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny on crafting hits with Joni Mitchell and David Bowie: ‘I had to keep telling myself it was real’

The virtuoso jazz guitarist has worked with a string of legends, winning 20 Grammys in the process. He speaks on his beginnings as a jazz trumpeter, and still striving to improve at 70

Pat Metheny is pretty much everywhere. For the past four decades, the 70-year-old guitarist has been crisscrossing the globe, playing an average of 150 shows a year. Instantly recognisable thanks to his wild mop of hair and the custom three-necked, 42-string guitar he wields on stage, Metheny has released more than 50 albums, won 20 Grammys and collaborated with David Bowie and Joni Mitchell, as well as free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and bass legend Jaco Pastorius. When we speak, he is 160 dates into a solo tour and fighting with patchy wifi in a hotel in Nancy, France, that aptly leaves an image of a guitar with hundreds of strings on screen rather than his signature plumage.

While he meticulously keeps written records of each show to improve on his performance, Metheny is widely considered a master improviser and virtuoso, pioneering an intricate, harmonic style that is as dextrous as it is melodic. Between shows and travel as his current tour kicked off, Metheny recorded 13 solo compositions that make up his latest release, MoonDial. Spanning the intimacy of Chick Corea cover You’re Everything to a downtempo reworking of his 2012 composition This Belongs to You and the instantly recognisable melody of the Beatles’ Here, There and Everywhere, it feels like Metheny at his most tenderly introspective.

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Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny on crafting hits with Joni Mitchell and David Bowie: ‘I had to keep telling myself it was real’

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