Biography
Instrumental guitarist Pat Thomi draws from jazz, classical, new age, and ambient realms to create a fusion distinct from his earlier work as a fusion performer. Born and raised in Basel, Switzerland, where his father performed classical and jazz piano, Thomi took up drums at age seven and later added piano and guitar before completing two years of study at the Basel Conservatory of Music. His first major project was the jazz-rock band Ramayana, which appeared at the prominent Swiss jazz festivals in Zurich and Montreux. On the advice of Swiss bandleader George Gruntz, Thomi moved to the United States to enroll at the Berklee School of Music, where he grew absorbed by film composition and its capacity to use sound to support visual imagery. He decided to remain in America and settled in Los Angeles in 1981, continuing guitar lessons with Pat Martino and Joe Diorio. During much of the 1980s he performed alongside fusion artists such as Jean-Luc Ponty, Gino Vannelli, Joe Vannelli, David Liebman, and L. Subramaniam, took on occasional session work for rock and pop acts, and supplied music for numerous television commercials as well as the series Knight Rider. After acquiring his own 24-track studio, Thomi gained the freedom to develop his material independently; the first outcome was his 1994 solo debut Night of the Coral, a blend of progressive and pop jazz fusion sounds produced by Joe Vannelli. Additional scoring assignments followed, among them the PBS documentary Speed and the independent film Dry Long So, which screened at Sundance. In 1998 Thomi turned toward new age contemporary instrumental music with the atmospheric album Fairytales, which featured his acoustic guitar. Remote Control, released in 2000, returned to technically demanding fusion guitar playing, yet the following year Pyramids integrated his gentle acoustic work with subtle electronic and ambient soundscapes.
Albums
