Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Pat Metheny

This week on Musical Musings: Five of the Best I’m joined by Jim Bricker, and we’re spending the afternoon with Pat Metheny. He’s a guitarist from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, who has spent fifty years making jazz that people who don’t think they like jazz end up loving. He was teaching university students while still a teenager. In 1977 he formed the Pat Metheny Group with pianist Lyle Mays, after the two met at a jazz festival in Wichita. Over the next three decades they built one of the most recognisable sounds in modern music: warm guitar, wide-open synths, wordless voices and plenty of Brazilian rhythm. Along the way Metheny became the only person to win Grammys in ten different categories.

Jim’s five are not short, so settle in. He starts with The First Circle (1984), whose handclap opening in 22/8 has had listeners counting for forty years. Then comes September Fifteenth, Metheny and Mays’ 1981 farewell to Bill Evans, recorded in Oslo the month he died. Next is Minuano (Six Eight), named after a cold southern wind; it grew from sixteen whistled bars into the centrepiece of Still Life (Talking). Jim takes Are You Going With Me? live from Travels rather than in the studio. To finish, he leaves the Group behind for Tromsø, a trio track recorded at the Blue Note Tokyo. Four of the five were written with Lyle Mays, who died in 2020, so this hour is partly a quiet tribute to him. It runs from Wichita to the Arctic, with a stop in Brazil.

Here is the video Jim mentions that Rick Beato did regarding September Fifteenth: https://youtu.be/qLhE720V4Co?si=aGh6dwQWvGZ5mPHG. Rick’s lengthy interview with Pat Metheny is also worth a watch.

Broadcast 9 October 2026