Al Di Meola — All Your Life (2013)

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Al Di Meola — All Your Life
Birth name: Al Laurence Dimeola
Born: July 22, 1954, Jersey City, New Jersey, United States
Genres: Jazz fusion, Latin jazz, world fusion
Occupations: Musician, songwriter, producer
Instruments: Guitar, keyboards, drums, cello, vocals, percussion
Location: New Jersey ~ Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts ~ who still resides in the Garden State
≈ Di Meola grew up in Bergenfield, New Jersey, and attended Bergenfield High School. ≈ He is now a resident of Bergen County, New Jersey.
Album release: 2013
Record Label: Valiana Records
Duration:     54:40
Tracks:
01. In My Life     (3:52)
02. And I Love Her     (4:31)
03. Because     (4:07)
04. Michelle     (5:13)
05. I Will     (2:53)
06. Eleanor Rigby     (2:51)
07. Penny Lane     (5:42)
08. Blackbird     (4:39)
09. I Am The Walrus     (4:05)
10. Day In The Life     (3:01)
11. Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite     (3:10)
12. With A Little Help From My Friends     (4:16)
13. If I Fell     (2:59)
14. She's Leaving Home     (3:22)
≈ Al played also in due with Gonzalo Rubalcaba. Gonzalo Rubalcaba (born May 27, 1963) is a Grammy Award-winning Cuban jazz pianist and composer. Website: http://www.g-rubalcaba.com
Notable instruments:
≈ Gibson Les Paul
≈ PRS McCarty
≈ PRS Al Di Meola

© Photo credit: Jan Frank

Website: http://www.aldimeola.com/
Website 2: http://innsbruckrecords.com/al-dimeola/all-your-life/
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/aldimeolatest
Description:
≈ Al Di Meola’s latest release, “All Your Life” is an acoustic tour de force that has him revisiting the music of the Beatles. A virtual one-man show of virtuosity, it features the guitar great interpreting 14 familiar Beatles tunes in the stripped-down setting of strictly acoustic guitar.
≈ “I’ve come full circle with this Beatles project. I started out my life loving the Beatles, and I never stopped, just like a lot of so many other guitarists from my generation. In the middle, we all went into whatever music we pursued in our careers – fusion, jazz, whatever it might be. We all wanted to further our craft. But when you come back to the Beatles’ music, it’s like, ‘Man, this stuff is still happening!’ All of it!” — Al Di Meola
In french:
≈ Un magnifique hommage aux Beatles.
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REVIEW
— by Bill Milkowski
≈ Like millions of other American boys growing up during the 1960s, guitarist Al Di Meola was forever affected by seeing The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show back in the era of black & white TV. His early encounter with the Fab Four lit a passion in him and may be directly responsible for the New Jersey native first picking up the guitar. “Had they not existed, I probably would be, who knows…a fireman today or some other job,” says the celebrated guitarist. “And beyond just me, they changed the whole world. There is no music in my lifetime that made as huge an impact on the world like that of the Beatles. What they did to modern pop music in the ‘60s changed everything.”
≈ Nearly 50 years after the first wave of Beatlemania washed onto Stateside shores, the six-string superstar returns to his early roots in paying a personal tribute to that seminal influence with All Your Life. A virtual one-man show of virtuosity, All Your Life features the guitar great interpreting 14 familiar Beatles tunes in the stripped-down setting of strictly acoustic guitar. On some tracks, like “In My Life” and “Because,” he overdubs three guitars to get the rich, shimmering textures and intricate patterns created on his signature Al Di Meola Conde Hermanos nylon string guitar, his Gibson steel string guitar and a 1948 Martin acoustic. Others like “Penny Lane,” “I Am The Walrus” and “I Will” utilize two guitars while “And I Love Her,” “Blackbird” and “If I Fell” utilized a single guitar track. All the percussion heard throughout the recording is Di Meola himself slapping the wood body of his instrument or strumming muted strings for percussive effect.
≈ All the tracks are imbued with the guitarist’s signature flamenco flourishes, intricate arpeggiating and dazzling cross-picking. Only one track does he employ other musicians (a dramatic reading of “Eleanor Rigby” that features a string quartet). Recorded in analogue at Abbey Road Studios in London, where the Beatles created most of their records during their heyday, All Your Life stands as a triumph in the long and illustrious career of a bona fide guitar hero.
≈ “I’ve come full circle with this,” says Di Meola, who was inducted into Guitar Player’s Gallery of Greats in 1981 after four consecutive wins as Best Jazz Guitarist in the magazine’s Readers Poll. “I started out my life loving the Beatles, and I never stopped, just like a lot of so many other guitarists from my generation. In the middle, we all went into whatever music we pursued in our careers — fusion, jazz, whatever it might be. We all wanted to further our craft. But when you come back to the Beatles’ music, it’s like, ‘Man, this stuff is still happening! All of it!’ And there’s not a day that goes by that we’re not somehow touched by the Beatles, whether it’s a story online or something we hear. It’s almost every day that we see some connection in our lives with the Beatles.”
≈ Back in the ‘70s, Di Meola blazed the fusion trail with supergroup Return To Forever and with his own powerhouse Latin-tinged fusion group. He focused on the purity of acoustic guitar during the early ‘80s with a trio of international virtuosos in Spain’s flamenco master Paco de Lucia and British-born founder of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, John McLaughlin. For the past 20-plus years, Di Meola has been courting a different muse with his World Sinfonia, a dynamic group that blends world music elements and also specializes in interpreting the work of Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla. The acoustic All Your Life follows on the heels of Di Meola’s 2011 recording, Pursuit of Radical Rhapsody, which incorporated everything from Argentinian tango to Spanish flamenco to Middle Eastern and North African music and included an electrifying interpretation of The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
≈ Di Meola says that playing that Beatles tune on his last album may have triggered something. “I thought, ‘Why stop there?’ These tunes are so familiar and beloved by everybody. And to be able to record them at Abbey Road Studios was really special. Being there, I felt like a kid for the first time since I was a kid. It’s an amazing place, like going to Disney World at five years old. Between that and getting to meet Paul McCartney last summer while I was preparing the record…the whole experience and what it meant to me is like a dream come true.”
≈ Di Meola’s serendipitous encounter with the ex-Beatle was a personal highlight for 2012. As he explains, “I had already recorded three tunes at Abbey Road and decided to rent a house for Labor Day weekend in the Hamptons, with the idea of working on arrangements for the rest of the pieces out there. And as I finalizing the deal with the realtor to rent this house, he tells me, ‘Oh, by the way, your next door neighbor is a famous pop star.’ And when I found out it was Paul McCartney, I got chills. So my wife and I drove out there and as we’re pulling into the driveway, there he was pulling out of his driveway right next to mine. No security, no nothing. And he was driving an old Ford Bronco. We finally got to meet on the third day. I saw him pulling out of the driveway and said hello. He rolled down the window and we talked for a while. I told him I was recording at Abbey Road, and all the time I’m thinking, ‘Here I am, talking to Paul McCartney! What the hell!’
≈ No doubt McCartney would be impressed by Di Meola’s personal interpretations of the 14 Beatles tunes featured on All Your Life. “The idea was to keep it simple,” says the guitarist. “Things always sound better when they’re not cluttered together. Essentially, I wanted to include all the syncopation in there while trying to keep the essence of the tune in tact in terms of melody. There’s been a lot of jazz guys who have done their own interpretations, but there’s usually so much reharmonizing and altering of the melody that you would never even know that it’s a Beatles tune. And I did not want to do that. My intent was to bring in the sophistication through rhythm as opposed to altering of harmony, which really would take the prettiness away. I wanted to preserve the beauty of these tunes.”
≈ While he says that certain tunes like “She’s Leaving Home” and “I Am The Walrus” were relatively easy to execute, others like “Penny Lane” and “Michelle” were extremely difficult. “Some of this stuff was as hard to practice and get right, in terms of the way that I syncopated it, as anything of Piazzolla’s. Even though you could view the Beatles as more simplistic music, it’s in the way that you approach it. And some of them were really tricky.”
≈ The May release of Di Meola’s All Your Life is the culmination of his own personal magical mystery tour. “This project is a lifelong dream, long overdue and immensely fulfilling!” says the guitar great. He plans to follow up this summer with a “Beatles and More” tour featuring his World Sinfonia augmented by string quartet.
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BIO
By Bill Milkowski
≈ A BONA FIDE GUITAR HERO and PERENNIAL POLL-WINNER, AL DIMEOLA has been recognized internationally over the past four decades as virtuoso of the highest order. A prolific composer and prodigious six-string talent, Di Meola has amassed over 20 albums as a leader while collaborating on a dozen or so others with the likes of the fusion supergroup Return To Forever (with Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White), the celebrated acoustic guitar trio featuring fellow virtuosos John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucia, and the Rite of Strings trio with bassist Clarke and violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. And while his dazzling technique on both acoustic and electric guitars has afforded him regal status among the hordes of fretboard aficionados who regularly flock to his concerts, the depth of Di Meola’s writing along with the soulfulness and his inherent lyricism of his guitaristic expression have won him legions of fans worldwide beyond the guitar aficionado set.
≈ A pioneer of blending world music and jazz, going back to early Latin-tinged fusion outings like 1976′s Land of the Midnight Sun, 1977′s Elegant Gypsy and 1978′s Casino, the guitar great continues to explore the rich influence of flamenco, tango, Middle Eastern, Brazilian and African music with his World Sinfonia, an ambitious pan-global group that he formed in 1991. Their exhilarating world music fusion has been documented on such releases as 2000’s The Grande Passion (featuring the Toronto Symphony Orchestra), 2007’s Live in London, 2011’s Pursuit of Radical Rhapsody and the stunning 2012 DVD, Morocco Fantasia (recorded at the Mawazine Festival in Rabat, Morocco and featuring special guests Said Chraibi on oud, Abdellah Meri on violin and Tari Ben Ali on percussion).
≈ Di Meola’s most recent release, 2013’s All Your Life, is an acoustic tour de force that has him revisiting the music of a seminal influence – The Beatles. “I really credit the Beatles for the reason why I play guitar,” he says. “That was a major catalyst for me to want to learn music. So their impact was pretty strong.” A virtual one-man show of virtuosity, it features the guitar great interpreting 14 familiar Beatles tunes in the stripped-down setting of strictly acoustic guitar. While overdubbing two and three guitar parts to get the rich, shimmering textures and intricate patterns of the original pieces, Di Meola added percussion by slapping the wooden body of his instrument or strumming muted strings for percussive effect. All the tracks are imbued with the guitarist’s signature flamenco flourishes, intricate arpeggiating and dazzling cross-picking. Only on one track does he employ other musicians (a dramatic reading of “Eleanor Rigby” that features a string quartet). Recorded in analogue at Abbey Road Studios in London, where the Beatles created most of their records during their heyday, All Your Life stands as a triumph in the long and illustrious career of a bona fide guitar hero. “I’ve come full circle with this,” says Di Meola. “I started out my life loving the Beatles, and I never stopped, just like a lot of so many other guitarists from my generation. In the middle, we all went into whatever music we pursued in our careers — fusion, jazz, whatever it might be. We all wanted to further our craft. But when you come back to the Beatles’ music, it’s like, ‘Man, this stuff is still happening! All of it!’ And there’s not a day that goes by that we’re not somehow touched by the Beatles, whether it’s a story online or something we hear. It’s almost every day that we see some connection in our lives with the Beatles.”
≈ Di Meola’s ongoing fascination with complex rhythmic syncopation combined with provocative lyrical melodies and sophisticated harmony has been at the heart of his music throughout a celebrated career that has earned him critical accolades, three gold albums and more than six million in record sales worldwide. He has been particularly enamored over the past 20 years by the tango music of the late Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla, whose compositions he has interpreted over time, beginning with 1990′s Di Meola Plays Piazzolla, continuing to 1993′s Heart of the Immigrants, 2002′s Flesh on Flesh and right up to 2007′s Diabolic Inventions and Seduction for Solo Guitar. “Piazzolla had a profound effect on my development as a musician and as a person,” says Al. “We became close friends, often communicating by mail. And during the course of this friendship my admiration and desire to learn more about this great man intensified.”
≈ A native of New Jersey who still resides in the Garden State, Di Meola was born in Jersey City on July 22, 1954. Growing up in Bergenfield with the music of Elvis Presley, The Ventures and The Beatles, he naturally gravitated to guitar as a youngster and by his early teens was already an accomplished player. Attaining such impressive skills at such a young age didn’t come easy for Al but rather was the result of focused dedication and intensive periods of woodshedding between his junior and senior years in high school. “I used to practice the guitar eight to ten hours a day,” he told DownBeat. “And I was trying to find myself, or find the kind of music that suited where I was going with the guitar.”
≈ His earliest role models in jazz included guitarists Tal Farlow and Kenny Burrell. But when he discovered Larry Coryell, whom Al would later dub “The Godfather of Fusion,” he was taken with the guitarist’s unprecedented blending of jazz, blues and rock into one seamless vocabulary on the instrument. “I used to ride the bus from New Jersey to see him at little clubs in Greenwich Village,” he recalls. “Wherever he was playing, I’d be there.” In 1971, Al enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and by the second semester there began playing in a fusion quartet led by keyboardist Barry Miles. A gig tape of that band was later passed on to Chick Corea by a friend of Al’s and in the early part of 1974 the 19-year-old guitarist was tapped to join the fusion supergroup as a replacement for guitarist Bill Connors. “I was just sitting around my apartment in Boston on a Friday afternoon when Chick called and asked me to come to a rehearsal in New York,” he recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. But in 10 minutes I packed some clothes in a bag, got a ride to New York and never saw that apartment in Boston again.”
≈ Following a weekend of rehearsals with Chick, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White, Di Meola made his RTF debut at Carnegie Hall on July 3, 1974, officially launching his career into the stratosphere. “Playing with Chick in Return To Forever was the first significant step in my development as a player,” says Al. “Chick is another major influence in my life. He has always been a wonderful supporter, major musical inspiration and a friend.” After three landmark recordings with Return To Forever – 1974′s Where Have I Known You Before, 1975′s Grammy Award winning No Mystery and 1976′s Romantic Warrior — the group disbanded and Al subsequently started up his career as a solo artist. His 1976 debut as a leader, Land of the Midnight Sun, was a blazing showcase of his signature chops and Latin-tinged compositions that featured a stellar cast including drummers Steve Gadd and Lenny White, bassist Anthony Jackson and Jaco Pastorius, keyboardists Jan Hammer, Barry Miles and Chick Corea and percussionist Mingo Lewis. Over the course of six more albums with Columbia Records - – Elegant Gypsy, Casino, Splendido Hotel, Electric Rendezvous, Tour De Force and Scenario — Al established himself as an influential force in contemporary music.
≈ 1980 marked the triumph of the acoustic guitar Trio with Paco De Lucia and John McLaughlin. Their debut recording on Columbia Records, Friday Night in San Francisco, became a landmark recording that surpassed the two million mark in sales. The following year, 1981, Di Meola was inducted into Guitar Player’s Gallery of Greats after four consecutive wins as Best Jazz Guitarist in the magazine’s Readers Poll. The three virtuosos in the Trio toured together from 1980 through 1983, releasing the studio album Passion, Grace & Fire in 1982. In 1995, they reunited for a third recording, Guitar Trio, follow by another triumphant world tour. In early 1996, Di Meola formed a new trio with the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and RTF bandmate Stanley Clarke called The Rite of Strings. Their self-titled debut was released in 1995. Di Meola subsequently recorded with the likes of opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti, pop stars Paul Simon and Dave Matthews, classical guitarist Manuel Barrueco, Japanese jazz pianist Yutaka Kobayashi and Italian pop star Pino Daniele. Over the course of his career, he has also worked and recorded with Phil Collins, Carlos Santana, Steve Winwood, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Milton Naciemento, Egberto Gismonti, Stevie Wonder, Les Paul, Jimmy Page, Steve Vai and Frank Zappa.
≈ In 2008, after 25 years of being apart, the potent Return to Forever featuring Corea, Clarke, White and Di Meola reunited for a tour of North America and Europe that began in Austin, TX, on May 29, 2008. They played 50 dates through August 7 of that year, which yielded the live two-CD set Returns and the concert DVD Live at Montreux. Di Meola has since focused on his New World Sinfonia band featuring Fausto Beccalossi on accordion, Peo Afonsi on acoustic guitar, Peter Kaszas on percussion, Gumbi Ortiz on percussion and Victor Miranda on bass. “The RTF reunion tour was fun and it was great for the fans, but it was more of a nostalgic thing,” says Al in retrospect. “I’m more interested now in moving forward with the New World Sinfonia, which has really developed into something beautiful. For me, it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve done in a long, long time, all the way around. You don’t have the overbearing volume with this band. Instead you have a rich harmonic kind of music with lots of improvisation, you have a music that is emotional, which really reaches far beyond the almost head-banging male crowd that electric fusion attracts.”
≈ In the past year, Di Meola has done duet tours with the great Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba. During this summer of 2013, following the release of his Beatles tribute album All Your Life, he plans to tour with World Sinfonia augmented by a string quartet in a program entitled “Beatles and More.” Says the guitar great, “I’ve come full circle with this Beatles project. I started out my life loving the Beatles, and I never stopped, just like a lot of so many other guitarists from my generation. In the middle, we all went into whatever music we pursued in our careers — fusion, jazz, whatever it might be. We all wanted to further our craft. But when you come back to the Beatles’ music, it’s like, ‘Man, this stuff is still happening! All of it!’ And there’s not a day that goes by that we’re not somehow touched by the Beatles. So this project has been immensely fulfilling. It’s a lifelong dream come true, long overdue.”
— by Bill Milkowski

© Music Avenue/The Store for Music
Solo studio works:
Land of the Midnight Sun (1976)
Elegant Gypsy (1977)
Casino (1978)
Splendido Hotel (1980)
Electric Rendezvous (1982)
Scenario (1983)
Cielo e Terra (1985)
Soaring Through a Dream (1985)
Tirami Su (1987)
World Sinfonia (1990) with Dino Saluzzi
Kiss My Axe (1991)
World Sinfonia II – Heart of the Immigrants (1993) with Dino Saluzzi
Orange and Blue (1994)
Di Meola Plays Piazzolla (1996) with Dino Saluzzi
The Infinite Desire (1998)
Winter Nights (1999)
World Sinfonía III - The Grande Passion (2000) with Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Flesh on Flesh (2002)
Consequence of Chaos (2006)
Vocal Rendezvous (2006)
Diabolic Inventions And Seduction For Solo Guitar (2007)
Pursuit of Radical Rhapsody (2011)
All Your Life (2013)
Live works:
Tour De Force – Live (1982)
Live in London (2007)
Melodia Live in Milano (2008)
World Sinfonia: Live From Seattle And Else Where (2009)
Live at the North Sea Jazz Festival (2012)
With Return to Forever:
Where Have I Known You Before (1974, Polydor)
No Mystery (1975, Polydor)
Romantic Warrior (1976, Columbia)
Returns (2009, Eagle (Fontana))
With the Guitar Trio:
Friday Night in San Francisco (1980) with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía
Passion, Grace and Fire (1983) with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía
The Guitar Trio (1996) with John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía
With Clarke and Ponty:
Rite Of Strings (1995) with Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty
As guest:
Venusian Summer (1975) with Lenny White and Larry Coryell
Go Live From Paris (1976) with Go
Go (1976) with Go
Go Too (1977) with Go
Hearts and Bones (1984) with Paul Simon
The Way In (1988) with Jeff Richman
Latin (1988) with George Dalaras
Touchstone (1990) with Chick Corea
Jazzpana (1993) with Vince Mendoza and Arif Mardin
David Broza (1995) with David Broza
Dance of Fire (1995) with Aziza Mustafa Zadeh
The Promise (1996) with John McLaughlin
Pavarotti & Friends For War Child (1996)
People In Room No 8 (1997) with Leslie Mándoki
The New Tango Project (1997)
Crossing The Bridge (1999) with Eileen Ivers
Inspiration – Colors & Reflections (2000) Aziza Mustafa Zadeh
Nylon & Steel (2001) with Manuel Barrueco
The Running Roads (2001) with George Dalaras
Camino Latino (2002) with Liona Boyd
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) with No Mercy
Soulmates (2002) with Leslie Mándoki
Black Utopia (2003) with Derek Sherinian
Deja Vu (2003) with Leonid Agutin
Cosmopolitan Life (2005) with Leonid Agutin
Midsummer Night In Sardinia (2005) with Andrea Parodi
Mária (Égi szerelem) (2007) with Miklos Malek and Eszter Horgas
The NYC Session: Beautiful Love (2007) with Eddie Gomez, Billy Drummond and Yutaka Kobayashi
Ő és Carmen (He and Carmen) (2008) with Eszter Horgas
Rockin in the Free World (2012) with G3 - Joe Satriani, Steve Vai & Steve Morse
As producer:
Magic Touch (1985) Stanley Jordan
Filmography:
Live at Montreux 1986, 1989, 1993 (2004)
Super Guitar Trio & Friends in Concert /1990 (2005) with Larry Coryell and Bireli Lagrene
Al Di Meola (2005) Re-release of VHS
One of These Nights (2005)
Di Meola/Clarke/Ponty – Live at Montreux 1994 (2005) with Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty
Super Guitar Trio: Live at Montreux 1989 (2007) with Larry Coryell and Bireli Lagrene
Speak a Volcano: Return to Electric Guitar (2007)
Cosmopolitan Live (2008) with Leonid Agutin
Return to Forever: Returns – Live at Montreux (2009) with Stanley Clarke, Chick Corea and Lenny White
Carmen (2010)
Live At North Sea Jazz Festival (2010)
One Night In Montreal (2010)
Morocco Fantasia (2011)