First was Bright Size Life, released in 1976, a trio album with bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius and drummer Bob Moses.

The next album, released in 1977, was Watercolors, featuring Eberhard Weber on bass, pianist Lyle Mays, and drummer Danny Gottlieb.

It won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance in 1984, which also brought the release of First Circle, a popular album that featured compositions with mixed meters.

It featured the song "This Is Not America", a writing and performing collaboration with David Bowie which reached #14 in the UK Top 40[2] and #32 on the US Billboard Hot 100[3] in early 1985.

Another popular track was "Last Train Home", a rhythmically relentless Metheny piece that builds to a single point of release where wordless vocals finally enter.

The 1989 release Letter from Home continued this approach, with the South American influence becoming even more prevalent in its bossa nova and samba rhythms.

Moving away from the Latin style which had dominated the releases of the previous decade, these albums included hip-hop drum loops, free-form improvisation on acoustic instruments, and symphonic signatures, blues and sonata schemes.

After another hiatus, the Pat Metheny Group re-emerged in 2002 with the release Speaking of Now, marking another change in direction through the addition of younger musicians.

Joining the core players (Metheny, Mays and Rodby), were drummer Antonio Sanchez from Mexico City, Vietnam-born trumpeter Cuong Vu from Seattle, and bassist/vocalist/guitarist/percussionist Richard Bona from Cameroon.

Metheny has said that one of the inspirations for the labyrinthine piece was a reaction against a perceived trend for music requiring a short attention span and which lacks nuance and detail.

[4] Many of the textures in The Way Up are created from interlocking guitar lines; Steve Reich is credited on the CD as an inspiration, along with Eberhard Weber, and there are large open sections for solo improvisation and group interplay.