Pat Martino was born Patrick Carmen Azzara on August 25, 1944, in Philadelphia, the son of Carmen "Mickey" Azzara, a tailor who sang in local clubs and had briefly studied guitar himself. His father put a guitar in his hands early and took him to hear music, and by his teens he was studying with the Philadelphia teacher Dennis Sandole, whose studio he shared with students including John Coltrane, James Moody and McCoy Tyner. His father also introduced him to Les Paul, an early mentor. Martino began working professionally at 15, moved to New York, lived for a time with Paul, and took a long residency at Smalls Paradise in Harlem, spending his summers at the Club Harlem in Atlantic City.

The apprenticeship that shaped him was the organ-combo circuit. Billed under his birth name, Pat Azzara, he was already on Prestige records with tenor saxophonist Willis Jackson by 1963, playing on Grease 'n' Gravy and The Good Life and staying in Jackson's band across a run of albums through Tell It... in 1967. He worked in the same years with the organists Don Patterson, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Trudy Pitts, Charles Earland, Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff and Jimmy Smith, and appeared alongside Sonny Stitt, the teenage alto prodigy Eric Kloss and Charles McPherson on their own Prestige dates. In June 1967 he stepped outside the organ world to record live at the Village Gate with the New John Handy Quintet, alongside vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, for Columbia's New View!

Prestige gave him his own first album later that year. El Hombre (1967) was cut at Rudy Van Gelder's studio with Trudy Pitts on organ and Danny Turner on flute, and four more leader dates followed in quick succession: Strings!, recorded in New York on October 2, 1967, with Joe Farrell on tenor and flute and Cedar Walton at the piano; East!, recorded January 8, 1968, with pianist Eddie Green, bassist Ben Tucker and drummer Lenny McBrowne; Baiyina (The Clear Evidence), recorded June 11, 1968 with tabla and tambura alongside Richard Davis and Charlie Persip and openly framed by its sleeve as a set inspired by the Koran; and Desperado in 1970. Together they made him, at 25, one of the most talked-about guitarists in jazz.

The 1970s took him further out. The Visit! (Cobblestone, recorded March 24, 1972) was dedicated to Wes Montgomery and paired him with Richard Davis and Billy Higgins; reissued by Muse as Footprints, it remains one of his best-loved records. Live!, taped in September 1972 and issued by Muse in 1974, carried a version of Bobby Hebb's "Sunny" that got radio play and became his signature performance. Consciousness (1975) reworked material by Joni Mitchell and Coltrane. Two Warner Bros. albums, Starbright (1976) and Joyous Lake (recorded in Miami in September 1976), pushed into electric fusion with synthesizers and a young band built around keyboardist Delmar Brown and drummer Kenwood Dennard. Between them came two spare Muse sessions cut days apart at Blue Rock Studio in February 1976: the duo record We'll Be Together Again with pianist Gil Goldstein, and the quartet date Exit with Goldstein, Richard Davis and Billy Hart.

Then it stopped. Martino had been suffering seizures for years, and by the end of the decade his condition made touring impossible; he took a teaching post at the Guitar Institute of Technology in Los Angeles. In 1980 doctors identified a hemorrhaged arteriovenous malformation, and the surgery that saved his life removed part of his brain. He woke with amnesia, no memory of his career and no idea how to play the guitar. He recovered his memories slowly and rebuilt his technique from his own records and from a computer, a process he later described as learning to live in the present rather than the past. He did not play publicly again until 1984, and made his recorded comeback with The Return, taped live at Fat Tuesday's in New York in February 1987 with bassist Steve LaSpina and drummer Joey Baron.

The second half of his career was longer than the first. Three Muse albums in the mid-1990s reunited him with pianist Jim Ridl and bassist Marc Johnson: Interchange (1994), The Maker (1994, first issued in Japan) and Nightwings (1996). Blue Note then signed him for a run that reached a wider audience than anything since the Prestige years: All Sides Now (1997), a duet album with guitarists from Les Paul to Kevin Eubanks, Tuck Andress, Charlie Hunter, Mike Stern and Joe Satriani; Stone Blue (1998), a fusion reunion with Delmar Brown, Kenwood Dennard, bassist James Genus and tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander; the Grammy-nominated Live at Yoshi's (2001) with organist Joey DeFrancesco and Billy Hart; Think Tank (2003), with Joe Lovano, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Christian McBride and Lewis Nash, which brought two more Grammy nominations; and Remember: A Tribute to Wes Montgomery (2006) with John Patitucci and David Kikoski. He moved to HighNote for Undeniable: Live at Blues Alley (2011), Alone Together with his old second guitarist Bobby Rose (2012), the archival Young Guns (2014) drawn from 1968-69 tapes of his trio with organist Gene Ludwig, Nexus (2015) with Jim Ridl, and the quintet album Formidable (2017), recorded in New Jersey that April with organist Pat Bianchi and drummer Carmen Intorre Jr.

He was named Guitar Player of the Year in DownBeat's 2004 Readers' Poll, received a Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame award in 1996, and published an autobiography, Here and Now!, written with Bill Milkowski, in 2011. A chronic respiratory illness ended his performing career in 2018, and he passed away on November 1, 2021, at the age of 77. The guitarists who grew up on his records paid him back directly: the Alternative Guitar Summit collective recorded two full albums of his compositions, Honoring Pat Martino, Volume 1 (2022) and Volume 2 (2026), with the tunes handed out in pairs to players including Kurt Rosenwinkel, Peter Bernstein, Sheryl Bailey, Steve Cardenas and Oz Noy.

Martino's playing is instantly identifiable for its evenness: long, unbroken streams of eighth notes delivered with a heavy, precisely alternated pick attack and almost no dynamic hedging, so that a solo arrives as one continuous thought rather than a series of phrases. He named Les Paul, Johnny Smith, Hank Garland and Joe Pass as early models and, above all, Wes Montgomery, with Jim Hall, Mundell Lowe and Barry Galbraith as lesser influences; what he took from Montgomery was warmth and line rather than the octaves and thumb technique, and he built on it a chromatic vocabulary that runs freely outside the underlying chord. He also thought hard in public about how the guitar works, teaching a system organised around the symmetry of the major and minor third intervals and publishing it in books and instructional videos, while insisting that the analysis came after the music: "I've always depended upon my own melodic instinct, instead of scale-like formulas." Critics and players treated his 1980 brain surgery and the years of relearning that followed as one of the extraordinary stories in the music, and the neurological literature took an interest of its own; the guitarist Wolf Marshall called him "a living legend, a national treasure, and an inspiration to musicians and music lovers of all stripes." His influence sits deepest in two places: the organ-trio guitar tradition he helped define in the 1960s, and the generation of technically formidable post-bop players who took his continuous eighth-note line as a starting point.