Patrick Bruce Metheny was born August 12, 1954, in Lee's Summit, Missouri, into a house full of horn players. His father, Dave, played trumpet; his mother, Lois, sang; his maternal grandfather, Delmar, had been a professional trumpeter. His older brother, Mike Metheny — later a trumpeter in his own right — taught Pat his first instrument, trumpet, when Pat was eight. At twelve, inspired by the guitar bands he heard on the radio, he switched to guitar and never looked back. By fifteen he was already working regularly on Kansas City bandstands with the city's best jazz musicians, an unusually early professional apprenticeship for a teenager from a small Missouri town.

That precocity kept accelerating. At eighteen, University of Miami dean Bill Lee heard him play in a Kansas City club and offered him a teaching position, making Metheny the youngest instructor in the school's history. A year later he moved to Boston to teach at Berklee College of Music, again its youngest-ever faculty member. It was at the 1973 Wichita Jazz Festival that eighteen-year-old Metheny first crossed paths with vibraphonist Gary Burton, who invited him to join the faculty at Berklee, where Burton was also teaching, and then into his working band. Metheny toured and recorded with the Gary Burton Quartet from 1974 to 1977, and it was there, backing a vibraphonist rather than a horn player, that he began developing the sound that would define him: an unusually fluid, legato articulation borrowed from horn phrasing rather than standard jazz-guitar picking, laid over an advanced harmonic and rhythmic sensibility.

His debut as a leader, Bright Size Life (1976, ECM), recorded in December 1975 with electric bassist Jaco Pastorius and drummer Bob Moses, reshaped what a jazz guitar trio could sound like for a new generation of players — warm, open, and melodically direct where the prevailing fusion guitar vocabulary leaned toward density and distortion. Watercolors (1977), with bassist Eberhard Weber, and New Chautauqua (1979) extended that early ECM run and established Metheny as a distinct compositional voice barely into his twenties.

In 1977 he formed the Pat Metheny Group with keyboardist and co-writer Lyle Mays, bassist Mark Egan, and drummer Danny Gottlieb — a unit that would run, through various lineups, for more than three decades. The group's self-titled 1978 debut and American Garage (1979) built the pastoral, melodically lush fusion sound the Group became known for. Metheny then deliberately stepped outside that sound for 80/81 (1980), a double LP recorded with bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and saxophonists Dewey Redman and Michael Brecker alternating chairs — a quartet date guided as much by Ornette Coleman's harmonic freedom as by Metheny and Haden's shared Missouri and Midwestern folk roots, and still regarded as one of the defining ECM sessions of the era.

Offramp (1982) — the first Pat Metheny Group album built around the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer and the first to feature vocals, courtesy of Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos — won the group's first Grammy. It was the start of an unmatched run: per Metheny's own official biography, the Pat Metheny Group "won an unprecedented seven consecutive Grammys for seven consecutive albums," a streak that ran through the live Travels (1983) and First Circle (1984, introducing vocalist-percussionist Pedro Aznar and drummer Paul Wertico) and on into Still Life (Talking) (1987) and Letter From Home (1989). In between, Metheny stepped fully outside jazz-fusion for Song X (1986), a ferocious collaboration with his formative influence Ornette Coleman, recorded with Haden, DeJohnette, and Coleman's son Denardo on a second drum kit — a free-jazz session as uncompromising as anything in Metheny's catalog.

The 1990s brought equally wide swings. Question and Answer (1990), a trio session with Dave Holland and Roy Haynes, returned to straight-ahead acoustic jazz; Secret Story (1992), an ambitious, orchestrally arranged solo statement built around more than eighty musicians, won a Grammy of its own. Two years later came Zero Tolerance for Silence (1994), five tracks of unaccompanied, un-overdubbed electric-guitar noise recorded in a single day — a record so far from the Pat Metheny Group's radio-friendly sound that it "shocked casual, and even some hardcore" fans on release, panned by much of the contemporary jazz press but carrying a cover endorsement from Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and later reassessed as a free-improvisation touchstone. That same decade, Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories) (1997), a duo record with Charlie Haden built on standards and folk-adjacent originals played on Linda Manzer–built acoustic guitars, won the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, and the Pat Metheny Group's Imaginary Day (1997) extended the group's Grammy streak further still. It was also around 1984 that Metheny began working with Toronto luthier Linda Manzer on the Pikasso guitar — a four-necked, 42-string hybrid instrument, two years and roughly a thousand hours in the building, that became one of his most recognizable stage props.

The Pat Metheny Group's final studio album, The Way Up (2005) — a single continuous 68-minute composition split across four tracks — won a Grammy and closed out the group's active touring life by 2010. In between, Metheny paired with pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jeff Ballard for the Metheny Mehldau sessions (2006), and in 2006–2007 he was one of five musicians, alongside Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau, John Patitucci, and Jack DeJohnette, on Michael Brecker's final album, Pilgrimage, recorded during a temporary remission from the leukemia that would kill Brecker in January 2007.

Metheny spent much of the 2010s building the Orchestrion, a room-filling ensemble of acoustic and acoustoelectric instruments — pianos, marimbas, vibraphones, custom-built "GuitarBots," blown bottles, percussion — mechanically triggered by solenoids and pneumatics under the control of his guitar, effectively letting him tour as a one-man orchestra. The resulting album, Orchestrion (2010), and The Orchestrion Project that followed extended a lineage of composer-controlled mechanical instruments into the 21st century. Unity Band (2012), a quartet record with saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist Ben Williams, and drummer Antonio Sánchez, won Metheny his twentieth and, to date, final Grammy at the 2013 ceremony; the group expanded into the Pat Metheny Unity Group for Kin (←→) (2014).

More recently, From This Place (2020) paired his working quartet with a full orchestra, and Road to the Sun (2021) turned to purely classical composition, written for guitarist Jason Vieaux and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. Since 2020, Side-Eye has served as an ongoing platform for young musicians who've caught Metheny's attention — keyboardist James Francies and drummer Marcus Gilmore among the rotating cast — playing more than a hundred shows a year under Metheny's direction without becoming a fixed band.

Metheny has won 20 Grammy Awards, more than any other jazz guitarist and, per his own official biography and Spotify artist page, in ten different categories — an unmatched spread across an artist's career in Grammy history. In December 2013 he was elected to the DownBeat Hall of Fame, becoming only the fourth guitarist so honored, after Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, and Django Reinhardt. He was named a 2018 NEA Jazz Master and inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Music the same year. He has also been one of jazz's most outspoken defenders of its own standards: in a widely circulated 2000 essay, he attacked Kenny G's electronically assembled "duet" with the late Louis Armstrong as "musical necrophilia," a broadside that remains one of the most cited flashpoints in jazz's long-running argument over artistic integrity versus commercial smooth jazz.

Metheny's sound was set early by two unlikely sources for a guitarist: three years inside vibraphonist Gary Burton's band, which pushed him toward a horn-like legato phrasing far removed from standard jazz-guitar picking, and a lifelong pull toward Ornette Coleman's harmonic freedom, which surfaced directly on 80/81 and fully on Song X. Those two poles — melodic warmth and harmonic risk — run through everything else: the Brazilian and Latin percussion textures Naná Vasconcelos, Pedro Aznar, and Armando Marçal brought to the Pat Metheny Group; the shared Missouri folk-music roots he and Charlie Haden drew on for 80/81 and Beyond the Missouri Sky; an early and unusually serious embrace of the guitar synthesizer (the Roland GR-300, later the Synclavier) as a genuine compositional voice rather than a gimmick; and a restlessness that let him move, often within the same decade, between the Pat Metheny Group's radio-friendly fusion, free-improvised noise (Zero Tolerance for Silence), solo acoustic minimalism (One Quiet Night), full orchestral writing, and a mechanically triggered one-man orchestra (the Orchestrion). Few guitarists of his generation have been rewarded by the industry — 20 Grammys across 10 categories — for a catalog this genuinely unwilling to repeat itself.