One of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time, ten out of ten music fans would probably agree. A player with astonishing technique, but also a pioneer of certain kinds of jazz fusion, as well as a great maestro of classical playing styles. All this is Al Di Meola, who will be one of the biggest stars of this year’s JazzFestBrno.
In the early 1970s, he attended Boston’s prestigious Berklee and by 1974 had joined the seminal band of his life, Corea’s Return To Forever. He recorded three albums with them, Where Have I Known You Before (1974), No Mystery (1975) and Romantic Warrior (1976), and released his first solo album, Land of the Midnight Sun, the same year his involvement with this seminal fusion group ended.
Al Di Meola is significant both for his phenomenal playing technique on both electric and acoustic guitar, and for his compositional style, in which he managed to uniquely combine the essence of jazz with the musical elements of the Mediterranean and Latin America to create a completely unique musical language – in this sense, he accomplished a similar feat in guitar jazz as Carlos Santana did in guitar rock, and it is no coincidence that the two colleagues toured together in 1980.
Throughout most of his career, Al Di Meola has been a very productive and active musician, with around three dozen solo albums alone, including very famous titles such as the multi-part World Sinfonia. However, the recordings in which Di Meola partners other colleagues are also very substantial and popular. Clearly the most frequently cited album of this rank is Friday Night in San Francisco (1980), which featured Al Di Meola’s breathtaking acoustic trio with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia, and produced arguably the most famous acoustic guitar recording of all time. Other musicians with whom Di Meola formed equal partnerships included guitarists Larry Coryell and Biréli Lagréne, bassist Stanley Clarke, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, pianist Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, and Czech-born keyboardist and composer Jan Hammer, with whom Di Meola worked on incorporating electronics into jazz music.
As the title of the concert at JazzFestBrno suggests, the newly seventy-year-old Al Di Meola will mainly recall the part of his career when his domain was the electric guitar, when he was one of the world’s leading exponents of fusion and enriched it with his own unforgettable contribution.
