I was minding my own business at work when the phone rang. It was Marsha. "Do you want to go see Al Di Meola tonight in Dallas?" was the question.
"Is the Earth round?" I replied.
So, a few hours later, we found ourselves sitting down in the Granada Theater on Lower Greenville in Dallas. This is a nice intimate venue, where we had also seen Leo Kottke in 2004 (another excellent live performer). We also found our friends Brigitte and Mik in the queue several places ahead of us. Talk about a small world...
The opening act was Rhett Butler. He is an exponent of the "tapping" style of guitar playing first popularized by Stanley Jordan, although I actually saw Andy Summers using elements of "tapping" when he played with The Police in the late 1970's. His "party piece" consisted of playing two guitars simultaneously, one for each hand. He also played part of the set with a bass player and kit drummer, which created an excellent overall soundscape based on a musical style that inhabits the gray area between rock, blues, folk and jazz. I was pleasantly surprised, since I half-expected the usual "inexperienced, squeaky artist" kind of suppport act, but Rhett Butler is clearly an accomplished musician who could hold his own against pretty much anybody. His final encore was an excellent solo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".
On to the star of the show...Al Di Meola manages to impress and infuriate me at the same time. As an electric guitar player, he has talent to throw away, with prodigious technique, and a unique guitar sound. He also is an excellent acoustic guitarist and composer. However, I initially hated his whole musical style, which seemed to me to be based on a surfeit of technique and a severe deficit in the taste department. I never really started to like him until he put away his trademark electric guitar in the 1980's and recorded albums such as "Soaring Through A Dream", which showed that he could play tastefully and thoughtfully instead of merely trying to play impossibly fast. He then founded World Sinfonia and recorded several excellent albums in the 1990's which mixed his own compositions with those of the great Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla.
Anyway, this tour is with his "electric" band, including Mario Parmisano on keyboards, and Gumbi Ortiz (who Di Meola, probably tongue-in-cheek, introduced by saying "he and I have been together 17 years which may be my longest relationship").
The concert began with several of his older compositions dating back to the late 70's and early 80's. I thought I recognized a couple of the tunes, but I couldn't honestly name them. He then launched into newer material, mixing electric tunes with World Sinfonia pieces (including "Misterio" and "Double Concerto").
The concert was long - over 2 hours with an interval in the middle. The band was tight as a duck's ass, and Al remarked at one point that he was enjoying playing electric guitar again and realized how much he had missed it. In quiet passages, the band sounded uncannily like the New Santana Band for brief periods of time - Al sounding remarkably like Carlos Santana with better technique.
The old issue remains for me - great player though he is, his electric guitar soloing doesn't do it for me - he tends to repeat the same patterns over and over again, and fails to leave enough space.
A secondary issue is the poor use of keyboard technology by Mario Parmisano. He seemed to be using stock voices on his 2 synthesizers, and this especially showed up on the string sounds he used, which were horribly cheap-and-nasty. His acoustic piano sound was not very good either. I guess that listening to Lyle Mays has raised the bar for me for synthesized sound. Mario badly needs a synth tech to work with him to get better-quality voices for his keyboards.
At the end, Al beckoned the audience up to the front and proceeded to play a lengthy encore where he and the band basically attempted to see how many different styles and tempos they could use to play a simple theme that he then would solo over and around.
The really good news - when I saw World Sinfonia in London in 1994, I got Al to autograph my ticket stub. At this concert, he was selling a limited edition CD of that London concert (I had been trying to obtain a radio recording of this concert via traders for some time, without success). I was therefore able to purchase a copy of the CD and get him to sign it. Al was his usual polite and gracious self, even shaking hands with me (which some guitar players are wary of doing for fear that a bone-crunching handshake will injure them).
A good, but not a great concert, primarily because I prefer Al Di Meola's acoustic guitar playing. I would like to have see him play more acoustic guitar, but I suspect that a lot of the fans still prefer the electric stuff.