SongVault Artist Profile

Patrick Butler is an accomplished guitar player whose abilities span many styles. He began playing the guitar at age 13. He studied jazz guitar with jazz legends Harry Leahey and James Spaulding.

Butler recorded and toured with funk band The Fatback Band, and appears on Fatback’s single, King Tim III, considered to be the first rap song recorded. During the Fatback years, he also studied with the Trinidadian jazz guitar player, Roland Prince, who was then living in Brooklyn.

Feeling the need for more creativity after touring with Fatback, Butler took two years "off" for a period of intensive composition. During this period, he composed a book called Pentatonic Flights, which used the pentatonic scale as the basis of the harmonic structure instead of the diatonic scale.

Moving to Los Angeles and forming Unstoppable, a power funk rock trio with Steven Hoshko on bass and Andre Allen on drums, Butler’s band played in many clubs in Hollywood. Butler appears on Mike Watt’s Ball Hog or Tugboat. He also appears on Banyan’s CD Anytime at All, Stephen Perkins’ acid jazz project.

Butler’s current projects include fronting the Celtic rock trio, Superkeltic, and jamming "space guitar with Dave Williams’ nu-jazz group, TheMajicBulletTheory. He is an annual attendee at Uli Jon Roth's Sky Academy.