I found the Pat Metheny home page and played some of his stuff...interesting, obvious talent....but hardly fits Jazz OR Folk. It is more influenced by jazz, but it is some sort of "contemporary musical free expression" in which 'style' is intentionally ignored. That's fine....he intrigues many people, and he explores, but he carefully avoids labels.

When musicians branch out and create new realms in music, they need new ways to describe it, rather than strrrretching old categories. Even if they have roots in the old ways, they are NOT the old way.

Metheny himself says ... "I was just a fan of music, and I didn't know that there were differences in style," Metheny says. "To me, music was music; it was just one big thing. The Beach Boys, the Beatles, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman were unified by the fact that their records were mixed together on the shelves of the little drugstore in our town. There were no different sections. Back then, there were musical things that I liked and wanted to learn, and they really jumped out at me. I never made much distinction about style. That's still sort of true."

Calling it "folk" is like calling the process of tying open tubes of paint over a canvas and hitting them with rolling pins "painting". Yeah, you get paint on a canvas...but...