Pat Metheny (b. 1954) on his debut album Bright Size Life (1976) conjures up vast soundscapes with his compositions for a trio. He has a relaxed approach, with attractive, ringing chord voicings, and plays smooth solos with languorous stretched notes and phrasing. The title track has an extended solo with a liquid tone, in which Metheny uses slides and hammer-ons on notes and chords, with touches of country music. "Sirabhorn" has a feeling of stillness with attractive bell-like plucked voicings and a graceful overdubbed melodic solo. He plays a bubbly head on "Missouri Uncompromised," and one of his strongest solos, which contains rippling flurries of legato notes moving to passages with double stopping and chordal improvising. The gentle "Midwestern Nights Dream," based on a melodic figure with fifths and close, resonant voicings on an echoing 12-string guitar, embodies his distinctive compositional style.

With his quartet The Pat Metheny Group, formed in 1978, he incorporates jazz-rock, fusion, and Latin influences. Guitar and guitar-synthesizer are put together for mellifluous backgrounds on Offramp (1982), creating an orchestral sound for tracks such as "The Bat Part II." On the contrasting title track, Metheny takes a fast, powerful violin-toned synth-guitar solo with inspired improvising. One of his most accomplished albums 80/81 (1980) puts Metheny in an acoustic jazz setting, where the inventive thinking on his solos often draws strongly on Ornette Coleman's work. The title track has skittering rhythms and free-jazz-style boppy lines, while there is a searching lyricism to "The Bat" and atonal phrasing on "Turnaround"; "Pretty Scattered" has a sinuous head that allows Metheny to explore spiraling lines that slide into singing upper notes      over straight-ahead, open-ended jazz rhythms. Metheny took his experimentalism further on Song X (1985) with Ornette Coleman, where he develops an angular free-jazz style with frenetic complexity.

John Scofield

Emerging in the late 1970s, John Scofield (b. 1951) draws from jazz and fusion and absorbs the motivic improvising of the Brecker Brothers using a grainy, rock sound. He improvises with bluesy lines, altered scales, and dislocated phrasing, making minor alterations to some of the motifs to create a sense of the unexpected. Hard-driving riffs with thick-textured distortion and country-style two- and three-note chords with hammered notes reflect another side of his style, and his solos often include two-note melodic improvisation on intervals such as sixths. Shinola (1982) shows Scofield in a live jazz-trio setting, and showcases his writing abilities. On "Why'd You Do It?", Scofield uses a broken, distorted sound for jazz chord voicings, which gives his playing a gritty edge, but on "Yawn" he creates a dark, introspective stillness and sad wistfulness with glimmering harmonies. "Dr. Jackie" features fluent legato phrasing, using arcing lines with bop architecture, and phrasing that curves back on it. In the duet with bass, "Jean the Bean," the guitar voicings and solos fit together organically. The title track is based on rock riffs and chords, but given a more modern edge, and Scofield plays with a blues-rock sound and vocabulary, augmented with his own jazz lines. As well as playing with Miles Davis, Scofield also led his own fusion group, which can be heard on the live album Pick Hits (1987).

Here he plays seamless lines and motivic improvisations over a solid groove, especially on tracks such as "Protocol."

In the late 1980s, Scofield moved toward a more traditional jazz-quartet sound, teaming up with saxophone player Joe Lovano and further developing his compositional ideas. On Time on My Hands (1990), he rides with the bass and drums, filling the sound and varying the duration of his comping with chips and volume-control layers. His muddy, broken harmonic ambiguity keeps the music open-sounding, and "Farmacology" provides a vehicle for his creatively fluent soloing. Ringing lines and chords are used for the atmospheric "Nocturnal Mission" and "Time and Tide," while "So Sue Me" has a supple head stating the tune on unison sax and guitar and a solo with vocal inflections and cutting phrasing: "Fat Lip," in contrast, is based on an attacking rock riff with rasping lines and iridescent distortion.

Meant to be (1991) sees Scofield playing his elliptical harmonic lines with space and intervallic ideas. On tracks such as "Go Blow" and "Mr. Coleman to You," the rhythm section has a relaxed, gliding pulse, leaving Scofield loose, relaxed, and free to explore creatively.

Bill Frisell

An iconoclast and one of the leading contemporary innovators, Bill Frisell (b. 1951) creates futuristic textures on guitar with extensive and carefully thought-out electronic and synthesized processing, together with unusual arrangements and instrumental lineups. On his album In Line (1983), "The Beach" contains a number of sustained parts, each with its own sound and texture, and he uses pitch movements to create a colorful soundscape. The contrasting "Throughout" features acoustic broken-chord figures with ethereal, layered electric melodies and harmonized lines that float and die away. Frisel’s unique lyrical soloing voice is processed to give a range of cello- and violin-like sounds in different registers. A remarkable timbral resonance chracterizes "Tone" on the album Rambler (1985), in which Frisell takes a solo full of swerving, crying notes and puts down low-register yawning, throaty noises.

Frisell's music is humorous and poignant on Lookout for Hope (1988). The title track contains remarkable sustained textures and broken chords, and notes swell and run across the sound field, disappearing into the distance and punctuated with searing upper-register calls. He creates a peculiar, futuristic country-style guitar sound and waltz sections for "Little Brother Bobby" by using volume control and a swelling pedal steel-guitar style. "Hangdog" reflects elements of Frank Zappa and minimalist composers, with interesting textural arrangements of repeating motifs and sonic effects. Lush, exotic background chords produce a landscape of sheets of sound in "Remedios the Beauty," over which there are strange melodic lines on acoustic guitar and a surprising rock-guitar entry. Harmonized lines and layered electric and acoustic guitars unfurl with a complex resonance, and Frisell takes a melodic solo with a deep sound, the strings vibrating against the frets. The poignant "Melody for Jack" has simple motifs with modern classical harmonies, and "Hackensack" uses a steel-guitar sound for a sonorous solo with partial chords. Shining chords unfold on "Little Bigger," with individual notes hanging in the air to form layers. Expressive individual characters are conjured up for "The Animal Race," and the haunting "Alien Prints" merges ethereal voicings, arcing lines, and crying upper notes with distortion and a pungent, trailing after sound. Changes are apparent on Frisell's Have A Little Faith (1993), the guitar on "Scenes From Across America" being given a disciplined role for arrangements of music ranging from Aaron Copland and Charles Ives to Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan.

Tradition & modernity

There is today a considerable divide between the many different types of jazz, in spite of crossover and fusion, and there continues to be a number of different playing styles that coexist but are largely separate from each other. Traditional players working within a framework of standards and conservative material include the talented Americans Russell Malone and Howard Alden, while in Britain; Martin Taylor's playing is largely inspired by Joe Pass. In France there has been a long-standing school of guitarists working within the Django Reinhardt style, which has produced players such as Birelli Lagrene. In contrast, Derek Bailey one of guitar's few true innovators-explores new territory and records freely improvised music that has been increasingly embraced by the mainstream. His Guitar, Drums 'N' Bass (1996) with D.J. Ninj is a wild mixture of programmed drums and percussion, with shrieking, distorted atonal guitar sitting over the background with remarkable cohesion.