One of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time, ten out of ten music fans will probably agree on that. A player with astonishing technique, but also a pioneer of some types 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.
At the beginning of the seventies, he studied at the prestigious Berklee in Boston, and already in 1974 he joined the key band of his life, Core'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 in the same year that his involvement in this essential fusion group ended, he released his first solo album, Land of the Midnight Sun.
Al Di Meola is significant not only for his phenomenal playing technique on both electric and acoustic guitar, but also for his compositional style, in which he managed to combine the essence of jazz with the musical elements of the Mediterranean and Latin America in a unique way for his time and thus create a completely unique musical language - in in this sense, he did to guitar jazz what Carlos Santana did to guitar rock, and it is no coincidence that the two colleagues toured together in 1980.
For most of his career, Al Di Meola has been a very productive and active musician, his solo albums alone number around three dozen, and among them are very famous titles, such as the multi-part World Sinfonia. Of course, recordings in which Di Meola is a partner to other colleagues are also very important and popular. By far the most cited album this morning is Friday Night in San Francisco (1980), where Al Di Meola's breathtaking acoustic trio with John McLaughlin and Pac de Lucía created probably the most famous acoustic guitar recording of all time. Among other musicians with whom Di Meola established an equal partnership were, for example, guitarists Larry Coryell, Biréli Lagrène, bassist Stanley Clarke, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, pianist Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, or the originally Czech keyboardist and composer Jan Hammer, with whom Di Meola worked on the integration of electronics into jazz music.
As the name of the concert at JazzFestBrno suggests, the newly seventy-year-old Al Di Meola will mainly remember the part of his career when he was dominated by playing the electric guitar, when he was one of the world's leading exponents of fusion and enriched it with his own unforgettable contribution.
