Joe Pass was born Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalacqua on January 13, 1929, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the son of a Sicilian-born steel-mill worker, Mariano Passalacqua. The family moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and it was there, after seeing Gene Autry play guitar in the 1940 Western Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride, that he asked for an instrument of his own. He was given a Harmony guitar at nine, took weekly lessons from a local teacher for six to eight months, and practiced as much as six hours a day. He was working paid dances and weddings around Johnstown by fourteen, and by the mid-1940s he was traveling with touring bands, including work associated with Tony Pastor and Charlie Barnet, before moving to New York City. He kept playing with big bands until 1947, when he enlisted in the military.

The decade that followed nearly ended the career before it started. Pass developed a heroin addiction after his service, spent a year in New Orleans playing bebop in strip clubs, and later described a breakdown there brought on by unrestricted access to drugs. Most of the 1950s went to arrests, convictions and prison time. His own summary was blunt: staying high came first, playing came second. In 1960, with no guitar of his own and by his account thirteen cents in his pocket, he checked himself into Synanon, the Santa Monica drug rehabilitation community, and stayed two and a half years, playing constantly the whole time.

He came out of Synanon with a recording contract. Sounds of Synanon, cut for Richard Bock's Pacific Jazz label and released on July 1, 1962, was made with fellow residents of the facility, and Pass played it on a borrowed solid-body electric because he still did not own an instrument. Leonard Feather reviewed it in the July 5, 1962 issue of DownBeat and wrote that the album did more than present a group of good musicians, it unveiled a star. Pass took the New Star award in DownBeat's eleventh annual Critics Poll the following year. Pacific Jazz kept him busy: Catch Me! with pianist Clare Fischer in 1963, For Django in 1964 with second guitarist John Pisano, and Simplicity in 1967. A February 1964 quartet session with pianist Mike Wofford went unissued for seventeen years before Blue Note released it as Joy Spring in 1981.

Through the middle and late 1960s Pass was largely a Los Angeles studio player. He appeared on Pacific Jazz dates for Gerald Wilson, Bud Shank, Les McCann and organist Richard "Groove" Holmes, worked in television orchestras, and spent 1965 to 1967 as a member of the George Shearing Quintet. His one record of the period made outside that ecosystem is among his best: Intercontinental, taped at the MPS studio in Villingen, West Germany in June 1970 with bassist Eberhard Weber and drummer Kenny Clare, an unusual document of Weber playing straight-ahead standards.

Everything changed when Norman Granz built Pablo Records around a roster of veteran players and put Pass at the center of it. His first date for the label was Duke Ellington's Duke's Big 4, recorded in Los Angeles on January 8, 1973 with Ray Brown and Louie Bellson. On a single day, August 28, 1973, Pass recorded two of the records he is still best known for: the duo session with Ella Fitzgerald that became Take Love Easy, and an unaccompanied solo program that Pablo issued as Virtuoso. That solo album, forty minutes of standards played with melody, bass line and chord voicings running at once and no overdubs, became the reference point for the entire idea of solo jazz guitar, and Pass extended it into a numbered series that ran to Virtuoso No. 4 and, posthumously, Virtuoso in New York.

The Pablo years put him in nearly every combination Granz could assemble. The Trio, taped at the London House in Chicago in May 1973 with Oscar Peterson and the Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, won the 1975 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance by a Group, and the Peterson partnership continued in duo (Porgy and Bess, 1976), trio and festival settings into the 1980s. He made four studio duo albums with Fitzgerald across thirteen years. He recorded with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown as The Big 3 and, with Mickey Roker added, as Quadrant; with fellow guitarist Herb Ellis for both Pablo and the young Concord Jazz label; with Zoot Sims on the duo record Blues for 2; with pianist Jimmy Rowles on Checkmate; and on Jazz at the Philharmonic and Pablo jam dates alongside Benny Carter, Clark Terry, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie. The one full detour was Tudo Bem! in May 1978, a Brazilian session with percussionist Paulinho da Costa and guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves.

Pass was diagnosed with liver cancer in 1992. He responded to treatment at first and kept working into 1993, but the illness forced him to cancel a planned tour with the classical and flamenco guitarists Pepe Romero and Paco Peña and the fingerstyle player Leo Kottke. The last two studio projects were an all-acoustic solo album recorded in Hollywood in August 1992 and released as Songs for Ellen, its title track a ballad written for his wife, and a set of Hank Williams songs cut with country guitarist Roy Clark on January 26 and 27, 1994, his final session. He played in public for the last time on May 7, 1994, at a Los Angeles club, with John Pisano beside him; Pisano told Guitar Player that afterward Pass said he could not play anymore. He passed away in Los Angeles sixteen days later, on May 23, 1994, at 65. Two signature instruments carry his name: the Ibanez JP20 archtop, introduced in 1982, and the Epiphone Joe Pass Emperor II, released in 1994 shortly before his death and produced until 2015.

Pass built a solo style out of a bebop single-line player's vocabulary and a pianist's sense of harmony, and the combination is what made the unaccompanied records possible: melody, moving bass line and chord voicings sounding at once, in tempo or freely, without loops, overdubs or effects. His technique was conventional in the sense that nothing exotic was involved, only fingerpicking, hybrid picking and flatpicking used interchangeably at very high speed, and a tone that writers reached for wind instruments to describe. The educator Wolf Marshall called his playing "hornlike," with single-note improvisations running like a saxophonist's stream of consciousness, and a tougher blues-and-R&B streak surfaces in his string bends, double stops and partial chords. Only three of the players he named as influences were guitarists: Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery. The rest were horn players and pianists, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum and Coleman Hawkins early on, and later Oscar Peterson. Scott Yanow has called him the ultimate bebop guitarist and the epitome of virtuoso guitarists, and Miles Kington, writing in The Times in October 1974, singled out the solo half of his sets, where without a rhythm section he could orchestrate a tune entirely by himself. His reach into the next generations of guitarists is direct and often stated: the Israeli-American guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, for one, names Pass alongside Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, Jim Hall and Kenny Burrell as the American guitar tradition he grew up listening to.