Kevin Metzger

Biography
Influencers

“A spring-fed dive pool for the deep listener athirst.”

Kevin Metzger is an accomplished guitarist and multi-instrumentalist flying down the road through broad plains of fusion. On this journey, he expertly erects power lines strung to pillars of combusting jazz, meticulous progressive and psychedelic rock, honest Baroque era classical, and popular American folk songs. Flip the fuse and listen to it power up.

A playful mind, a musician’s artist; his music is built upon high level composition, deep reliance on improvisation, and paramount performance moments. His debut album Many Worlds, a collaboration with longtime friend R. Aaron Walters, blends jazz, classical, and rock influences into a deeply personal and emotionally resonant statement. Tracked live in Austin and completed in Nashville, the record moves fluidly between original compositions and reimagined works by Keith Jarrett, Jerry Garcia, Bach, and Jan Hammer. Across seven tracks, Metzger’s guitar voice shifts from lyrical restraint to angular intensity; grounded and supported by the duo’s deep sense of trust and shared musical language.

In 2023, Kevin was awarded the City of Austin Live Music Fund Grant to create The Bachian Swing Consort, the forthcoming 2025 live-album & film project recorded over two nights in January 2024. The ensemble, featuring Rashaan Allwood, R. Aaron Walters, Rebekah Smeltzer-Staley, and Page Stephens, reinterprets the music of J.S. Bach through historically informed contemporary improvisation, extended harmonic language, and flexible rhythmic frameworks. Interwoven with these arrangements are standalone movements of free group improvisation, creating a dialogue between structured counterpoint and open-form expression. The pairing is central to the project’s concept, offering two complementary approaches to invention that reflect both historical lineage and present-day spontaneity.

Kevin Metzger is one half of the Atonal Guitar Duo, a collaborative project with composer Jared E. Davis focused on expanding the structural vocabulary of contemporary guitar music. Drawing on Davis’s system of interval set theory, the duo composes and improvises using tightly organized collections of intervals in place of traditional harmonic progressions. What began as Metzger’s study of the system has evolved into a partnership centered on developing and testing new approaches to atonality through performance. In 2024, they presented their work in a lecture-performance at Texas State University and were featured on Texas Public Radio’s Performance Saturday, performing their composition “Four Seconds.” Their anticipated 2025 self-titled debut album reflects an ongoing commitment to precision, experimentation, and the expressive potential of non-tonal materials

Kevin was born and raised in Syracuse, NY and was exposed to live and improvised music by his parents before he was even out of the womb, leading to an upbringing that would foster a deep love and appreciation for art and music. By age 14 he was already writing and performing his own original music in venues in the greater Central New York area with his progressive-rock band Lee Terrace, and he has never given up that drive to perform and write.