In the late 1960s a scholarship freshman walked into the University of Miami dean’s office to drop out, overwhelmed by academic life after spending his adolescence doing nothing but playing guitar. Instead of accepting the withdrawal, Dean Bill Lee hired him to teach electric guitar to students older than he was. This episode charts Pat Metheny from a brass-dominated swing household in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, where his father, grandfather and brother all played trumpet, through the Beatles on television in 1964, a three-quarter size Gibson ES-140 at 12, wearing out Wes Montgomery’s Smokin’ at the Half Note, and the decision at 14 or 15 to stop imitating his hero, using Ornette Coleman’s New York Is Now as the exit ramp.

The story continues through a DownBeat jazz camp, Attila Zoller, Kansas City gigs, teaching at Berklee under Gary Burton, and joining Burton’s band in 1974 with an electric 12-string. It covers the accidentally recorded 1974 jam with Jaco Pastorius, Paul Bley and Bruce Ditmas, the standoff with ECM’s Manfred Eicher over putting Jaco’s electric bass on Bright Size Life, the 1977 formation of the Pat Metheny Group with Lyle Mays, American Garage hitting number one on the jazz charts in 1979, work with Naná Vasconcelos, David Bowie and the film The Falcon and the Snowman, and his relentless tool-building: the Roland GR-300 guitar synthesizer played like a trumpet, the 42-string Picasso guitar built with Linda Manzer, and the 2010 Orchestrion, a mechanical orchestra triggered from his fretboard and inspired by Steve Reich. It closes with his family life, a cancelled China tour in May 2025 for a medical procedure, and his record of 20 Grammys across 10 categories.

• How a house full of trumpets shaped the phrasing of a future guitar innovator
• Why sounding exactly like Wes Montgomery at 15 became a crisis worth solving
• The Bright Size Life fight over Jaco Pastorius and what it revealed about his convictions
• Guitar synthesizers, the Picasso guitar and the Orchestrion as instruments he had to invent
• What true mastery means when your instrument becomes the obstacle