As legendary jazz albums go, Friday Night in San Francisco is a cult classic. Recorded live at San Francisco's Warfield Theatre on December 5, 1980, the album was released in 1981 and featured three superb guitarists—Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía. All three played acoustic models. In some respects, the album's popularity at the time demonstrated that jazz fusion had run its course and that fans had aged and were ready for a change. The album also helped kick off jazz's acoustic-revival movement of the 1980s.
What has long puzzled the album's many fans is what happened to the music performed on Saturday night, December 6? Now, Impex Records has released that long lost sister performance after the tapes were found in Al's home in New Jersey. As author Chuck Granata writes in his terrific liner notes for the new release:
The [album's] story begins deep within the basement of Al Di Meola’s North New Jersey home, in a musty crawlspace filled with multitrack tapes and master recordings for scores of live performances. It’s where the six, unmixed 16-track masters for the San Francisco shows—recorded by engineer Tim Pinch—were plucked from obscurity and restored, edited and mastered for this high-fidelity release of the bookend to Friday Night In San Francisco.
Al is perhaps best known for replacing guitarist Bill Connors in keyboardist Chick Corea's Return to Forever band in 1973, with Stanley Clarke on bass and Lenny White on drums. When the group disbanded in 1976, Al went on to a long and successful solo career. As you'll hear on Saturday Night in San Francisco, the music is just as exciting and virtuosic as Friday Night. It's fascinating to hear three artists of this caliber go at it on acoustic guitars and reach deep for their best Mediterranean techniques and fastest runs.
Recently, I conducted an email interview with Al, with the assistance of Chuck Granta and Abey Fonn, the founder of Impex Records.
Here's my e-conversation with Al:
Jazz Wax: What’s the difference between Friday Night in San Francisco and the newly discovered Saturday Night?
Al Di Meola: Over the two nights, we played all of the music we planned to perform. In other words, if you were to listen to Friday Night and Saturday Night consecutively, you'd hear the show in terms of how much music we played. So we just took the music of Saturday Night, found other songs that didn't wind up on the Friday Night disc and we released it.
JW: So fans shouldn't think that Saturday Night is just the scraps being positioned as a find?
ADM: Absolutely not. Saturday Night is as good as Friday Night. It's just different. They're different pieces. And you have different configurations. On Friday Night, you had only one trio piece that was played live. The rest were duets, and they were really long duets. On Saturday Night, you have four trio pieces. You also have three separate solo sections. So, Paco de Lucía does a solo by himself, John McLaughlin does a solo, and I do a soul. And they're pretty extraordinary, because we were playing together on the road for two months, every single night. But there's no such thing as a perfection, because we were experimenting.
JW: Were you playing for yourselves or the audience?
ADM: We were really outside of our comfort zone, trying to impress one another on stage, not the audience so much, although the audience was digging, everything we were doing. So there's things that work and some that were a little out of sync. Maybe a few notes were off. If we had been in a recording studio, we might fix them. But we weren't. It was the same with Friday Night. That's what live records are all about. It's about the moment and the inspiration and the ability that we had. As for our velocity, it was almost unimaginable. It's really hard to imagine that today. That's what you'll get from Saturday Night.
JW: Were you each trying to outdo the other two?
ADM: In a way we were. Someone would take a solo, because we're all about the solos. The compositions were secondary to the solos. But when one of us took a solo, many, many choruses were played, usually to build them. Of course, the other two guitarists were listening to this and thinking, “Oh my God. Now my turn is next. I've got to come up with something that is going to be great, because the solo I just heard it was mind-blowing." So there was that pressure to supersede what you normally might do on your own with a backing group. It was healthy competition because we were trying to impress each other, and we did. [Photo above of Paco de Lucía by Paco Junquera]
JW: What impressed you most about the playing by John and by Paco?
ADM: Paco comes from a flamenco tradition, which is very different than John and my backgrounds. What impressed me most was Paco's rhythmic ability, which is inherent in the flamenco tradition. Paco and I, I think, got along very well because we both had a very strong background. Although I wasn't flamenco in my tradition, I had a strong Latin background with rhythm. And John was more influenced by Indian music. So it was just great. I mean, each player had something completely different. And we influenced each other. [Photo above of John McLaughlin at home in Monaco by Ina Behrend, courtesy of John McLaughlin]
JW: You grew up in Bergenfield, N.J. Was your family close?
ADM: Very much so. My mom and dad were wonderful parents. My sister was seven years older, so I didn’t see a lot of her as a child and I don’t have many memories, since she was off at college by the time I was 12. I do remember that she had a party one night when my parents were out. Some of her friends brought over guitars and amps. I was 7 or 8 and was mesmerized by the sound of a Stratocaster guitar coming through a Fender amp. At one point, I picked up the Strat and tried to play it. [Photo of Bergenfield, N.J., in the 1960s]
JW: What did your parents do for a living?
ADM: My mom was a traditional Italian-American homemaker. My dad was a builder.
JW: Were they musical?
ADM: Not really. For me, I loved listening to music and discovering new bands and records. Growing up in the 1960s was amazing. The decade was a revolution of new ideas. There really hasn’t been anything like it since in terms of music affecting and shaping a generation of kids and artists. So I was affected by everything going on around me, musically.
JW: Were your parents born in the U.S. or had they immigrated from Italy?
ADM: I know for sure that my mom lived in Italy up to the age of 13. I’m uncertain if she was born there or she was born here and then returned to Italy as a baby. I say this because her mom passed away from tuberculosis when she was very young. My dad was born here and had a very large Italian family. He had 13 brothers and sisters.
JW: Do you still have lots of relatives over for Sunday lunches?
ADM: We had a lot of that when I was growing up, especially over the Christmas holiday season and for special events.
JW: Did growing up with those events inspire your passion for food?
ADM: Oh my God, yes. My parents lived for Italian food and Italian restaurants. We loved the tradition of Italian food, and it was very much a part of their life. The enjoyment they got from life was through food.
JW: Speaking of Italian food, how did your Home Events idea come about?
ADM: Growing up, I'd watch my mom make pasta and cook. I learned that if you know the right ingredients for a dish and how it is supposed to taste, you're halfway there to becoming a cook or even a professional chef, if that's what you want to do. But it was music that I really wanted to pursue, not cooking. Coming up with the Home Events idea began during the first year of the Covid pandemic.
JW: Can you tell JazzWax readers what your Home Events concept is all about?
ADM: It started on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2020. We had invited an old friend and his wife to sit outside on our deck. I thought I’d give my wife, Stephanie, who's an amazing cook, a break. I said, “Look, let me do the cooking today. I have a dish that I know is going to blow them away. It’s a special dish of cavatelli pasta." It's really the ingredients that makes this dish unique.
JW: What happened?
ADM: I was feeling really good. It was a beautiful day and I’d been off the road for a long time, so I was super relaxed. It was one of the first times we'd had friends over since the start of the pandemic, so everyone was happy to see each other in person. I proceeded to make this dish. Midway through, I asked my wife to go livestream on our computer so that fans around the world could see what I was up to. Of course, I'd already had a couple glasses of wine, so I was feeling pretty good. At one point, I looked at the camera and said, “And if you want, you can come here, and I'll cook for you in person."
JW: Pretty risky given the world these days, no?
ADM: I was only joking. But later that night, we read the comments from people who watched. Many of them were asking if I was for real about that offer or was it just a joke. My wife and I looked at each other and the idea clicked. We thought, “Hey, wait a minute. Maybe we can do this as a side business—part charity, part business, and take this to another level." We came up with multiple price-point packages that included having them over for the experience of watching me cook, enjoying different wines and champagnes, and experiencing a tour of my house, which is like a museum because it's has all of my collection of things that I've acquired over the last 40 years or so. At the end of the night, for certain packages, we'd site down for a two-hour, three-course meal with Italian desserts. Then we'd go down into the studio and play a private recital, which is something I think Home Events guests really enjoy.
JW: Perfect strangers to your house for dinner and music?
ADM: That's it. Both of us said, “We just came up with a beautiful idea that I haven't seen anyone else do." I mean, anywhere. And it's not like we've read about any other artist doing it. I couldn't do this by myself. It's really a joint effort between me and my wife, and we love doing it for fans. And sometimes, I offer a jam or a lesson. One of our packages includes them getting their guitar signed. So there's three different packages in the home events.
JW: Did your parents listen to music?
ADM: There was a lot of music being played at our family home. I remember my dad having a lot of classical music and he had a Les Paul and Mary Ford record or two. But it was my sister who brought home 45s or albums of all the current hits on the radio. That’s how I was introduced to the Beatles. She brought home Meet the Beatles when it came out over the Christmas holiday in 1963. Listening to that album really changed my life. Then in February of '64, they were on the Ed Sullivan Show several times while they were in the U.S. for a couple of weeks. We watched that live. It changed the whole music scene for me and made me want to be a musician.
JW: Was Elvis Presley an inspiration, or his guitarist Scotty Moore?
ADM: Elvis was the first person I saw on TV with a guitar who caused that kind of excitement. He was a big sensation in my early years in the late 1950s.
JW: What was it about Scotty Moore and the Ventures that lit you up?
ADM: I loved the sound of an electric guitar and that old string reverb, which was so prevalent back then thanks to Scotty. Me and my buddies, we had bands, several different bands, where we played tunes by the Ventures. A lot of songs were spin-offs of Apache, by the U.K.'s Shadows. I loved playing that song, or the Ventures' Walk, Don't Run. And then the Rolling Stones arrived in the mid-1960s and we did their stuff.
JW: What else were you listening to in the mid-1960s?
ADM: I became a big country-rock fan—the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers and later, Crosby, Stills and Nash. It was an explosive time for music coming out of Britain, Los Angeles and San Francisco. I loved all those bands, including Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. It was the best era.
JW: Did your parents buy you a guitar for your birthday?
ADM: Yeah, I really expressed a strong desire. I was 8 or 9. Initially, when I was really young, they were hoping I would take accordion lessons. But by then, the accordion was a corny-sounding instrument to most of us. The electric guitar was the big thing. My parents wanted to start me on something inexpensive just to see if it would stick.
JW: What did they buy you?
ADM: A very cheap acoustic guitar, with the strings about two inches from the neck, making it really hard to play. But I was passionate about my journey to learn guitar. There was no let up on my part.
JW: Once you had the guitar, did you take lessons? Or did you learn the basics from books and records?
ADM: I started taking lessons at the local music shop, a place that only gave lessons. It was close to our home. I was assigned this teacher who was more versed in old-school jazz guitar. Even though I learned scales and chords and how to read music at an early age, I also learned some Beatles songs and stuff like that. I still have those books where the teacher wrote out the music.
JW: Who were your favorite guitarists by the early '60s?
ADM: My guitar teacher was my biggest influence. I thought he was just amazing. In the early '60s, I was still a young boy, but by 1967, I began to learn about new guys coming up, like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. But it wasn't until my teen years that I began to appreciate players who were phenomenal. At the Fillmore East in New York’s East Village, I got to see Pete Townshend with the Who and Carlos Santana.
JW: When did you start playing in a high school band?
ADM: I had several bands in high school, but not right away. I had one in my junior year. As I got into a deeper part of learning about the instrument, I wasn't really playing like the guys I used to go see because I was playing more scale-ular stuff rather than riff-based rock. I didn't really fit into those kind of bands by then.
JW: Were your parents worried about your passion for a music career?
ADM: When I was a teenager, my father leaned on me hard to go to school to learn a trade so I had something to fall back on. I refused to listen to him. I really knew what I wanted to do and didn't need a Plan B. So my parents saw my drive, which led me to Boston’s Berkeley School of Music after high school. There was no turning back.
JW: Was Berklee a big turning point?
ADM: Berkeley was great. I mean, it just was the next step in my education. Each of my classes there was designed to include the guitar. So I'd have to bring my instrument to each class. Everything applied to the guitar. It was very well organized in that sense. There were a lot of great players studying up there, too, so you were surrounded by them. I was very fortunate to go to to school up there. I wish I had been able to remain there longer, but I got my big break when I was pretty young.
JW: What happened?
ADM: Chick Corea heard a tape given to him by a friend of mine. Chick called me at Berklee and asked me to join the band. He said, “Our first show is at Carnegie Hall in a few days and we need a guitarist to join the band. We heard a tape of you that knocked us out." This friend of mine was an amateur recording engineer and had taken the tape to Chick and his manager and bugged them until they listened to it. The timing was perfect because the guitarist they had was leaving, so they gave a listen. It was really a matter of good timing and diligence on my friend's part.
JW: At Berklee, had there been a fusion curriculum at the time?
ADM: Not really, but everyone had their own sound influenced by the rock they were listening to. I was there at the beginning of the fusion era, which started to catch on in 1972. When I joined Chick’s band in 1973, audiences were beginning to get quite large. So yeah, we were at the forefront of a new idiom and it was exciting. The music was all about excitement. Of the three big bands that led the fusion movement—John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report with Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter and Return to Forever, Chick's band was probably the most compositional in terms of the content.
JW: Were you listening to hard rock guitarists at that time as well, to get the feel?
ADM: Not really, no. I was listening to guys who were more like the fathers of fusion. Players like Larry Coryell, who really started the whole movement by blending jazz with rock and country influences, and John McLaughlin. Someone I listened to a lot in college and is someone I really look up to is Ralph Towner, who's equally great on piano as he is on guitar. His way of composing has been a super big influence on me. I also listened to Alberto Guzmatti from Brazil. They're more on the acoustic side of things, but Larry and John in the early '70s were inspiring me to do my thing on the electric guitar. They were the pioneers.
JW: How did you come to love Mediterranean music?
ADM: I was born in an Italian dominated environment and grew up with all of my relatives. So Mediterranean music was all around me. I also was influenced by flamenco guitar and Paco. All of the countries on the Mediterranean have different types of folk music that evoke the image of that region.
JW: How did you discover Paco?
ADM: I was on tour with Return to Forever in 1974. When we arrived in Spain, there was a lot of talk about this hot new guitarist, Paco de Lucia. I discovered him because I was curious. I bought a few of his records in Madrid. When I returned home, I played them. He was taking the idiom to another level. I had this idea in the back of my mind of doing something with him. That's when we actually put it together.
JW: So, Friday Night in San Francisco was a big turning point for you, career-wise, yes?
ADM: I would say that the turning point had already occurred as a result of Return to Forever. But this concert was another great event along the way.
JW: Which five albums in your discography would you recommend as a gateway to your music?
ADM: Elegant Gypsy was the quintessential album of my early years. It also was the introduction of Paco and myself doing a duet called Mediterranean Sundance. Soon after came Friday Night in San Francisco with John and myself. That album sold something like 7 million copies. I've recorded more than 30 albums that I think are at a high level, artistically. Infinite Desire might not be as big a seller as those other ones, but I love it. I also love Kiss My Axe. Those are great production records, on which I play both electric and acoustic. I love Pursuit of Radical Rhapsody and the new record I'm working on. I'm also proud of my two Beatles tribute albums—All Your Life (2013) and Across the Universe (2020).
JW: What do you think of Saturday Night in San Francisco?
ADM: I've been very fortunate to have artistic freedom to do what I want and really work on my records until I'm proud of them. And so that's what I have here. I hope people love this new record as much as I do. It's the early Al, you know? I've grown a lot since then, so there's a different Al now. But it was good to get this music documented so that people can hear where we were at our best back then.
JazzWax clips: Here's Splendido Sundance from the new album...
Here's Al, Paco and John on tour in 1981...
What has long puzzled the album's many fans is what happened to the music performed on Saturday night, December 6? Now, Impex Records has released that long lost sister performance after the tapes were found in Al's home in New Jersey. As author Chuck Granata writes in his terrific liner notes for the new release:
The [album's] story begins deep within the basement of Al Di Meola’s North New Jersey home, in a musty crawlspace filled with multitrack tapes and master recordings for scores of live performances. It’s where the six, unmixed 16-track masters for the San Francisco shows—recorded by engineer Tim Pinch—were plucked from obscurity and restored, edited and mastered for this high-fidelity release of the bookend to Friday Night In San Francisco.
Al is perhaps best known for replacing guitarist Bill Connors in keyboardist Chick Corea's Return to Forever band in 1973, with Stanley Clarke on bass and Lenny White on drums. When the group disbanded in 1976, Al went on to a long and successful solo career. As you'll hear on Saturday Night in San Francisco, the music is just as exciting and virtuosic as Friday Night. It's fascinating to hear three artists of this caliber go at it on acoustic guitars and reach deep for their best Mediterranean techniques and fastest runs.
Recently, I conducted an email interview with Al, with the assistance of Chuck Granta and Abey Fonn, the founder of Impex Records.
Here's my e-conversation with Al:
Jazz Wax: What’s the difference between Friday Night in San Francisco and the newly discovered Saturday Night?
Al Di Meola: Over the two nights, we played all of the music we planned to perform. In other words, if you were to listen to Friday Night and Saturday Night consecutively, you'd hear the show in terms of how much music we played. So we just took the music of Saturday Night, found other songs that didn't wind up on the Friday Night disc and we released it.
JW: So fans shouldn't think that Saturday Night is just the scraps being positioned as a find?
ADM: Absolutely not. Saturday Night is as good as Friday Night. It's just different. They're different pieces. And you have different configurations. On Friday Night, you had only one trio piece that was played live. The rest were duets, and they were really long duets. On Saturday Night, you have four trio pieces. You also have three separate solo sections. So, Paco de Lucía does a solo by himself, John McLaughlin does a solo, and I do a soul. And they're pretty extraordinary, because we were playing together on the road for two months, every single night. But there's no such thing as a perfection, because we were experimenting.
JW: Were you playing for yourselves or the audience?
ADM: We were really outside of our comfort zone, trying to impress one another on stage, not the audience so much, although the audience was digging, everything we were doing. So there's things that work and some that were a little out of sync. Maybe a few notes were off. If we had been in a recording studio, we might fix them. But we weren't. It was the same with Friday Night. That's what live records are all about. It's about the moment and the inspiration and the ability that we had. As for our velocity, it was almost unimaginable. It's really hard to imagine that today. That's what you'll get from Saturday Night.
JW: Were you each trying to outdo the other two?
ADM: In a way we were. Someone would take a solo, because we're all about the solos. The compositions were secondary to the solos. But when one of us took a solo, many, many choruses were played, usually to build them. Of course, the other two guitarists were listening to this and thinking, “Oh my God. Now my turn is next. I've got to come up with something that is going to be great, because the solo I just heard it was mind-blowing." So there was that pressure to supersede what you normally might do on your own with a backing group. It was healthy competition because we were trying to impress each other, and we did. [Photo above of Paco de Lucía by Paco Junquera]
JW: What impressed you most about the playing by John and by Paco?
ADM: Paco comes from a flamenco tradition, which is very different than John and my backgrounds. What impressed me most was Paco's rhythmic ability, which is inherent in the flamenco tradition. Paco and I, I think, got along very well because we both had a very strong background. Although I wasn't flamenco in my tradition, I had a strong Latin background with rhythm. And John was more influenced by Indian music. So it was just great. I mean, each player had something completely different. And we influenced each other. [Photo above of John McLaughlin at home in Monaco by Ina Behrend, courtesy of John McLaughlin]
JW: You grew up in Bergenfield, N.J. Was your family close?
ADM: Very much so. My mom and dad were wonderful parents. My sister was seven years older, so I didn’t see a lot of her as a child and I don’t have many memories, since she was off at college by the time I was 12. I do remember that she had a party one night when my parents were out. Some of her friends brought over guitars and amps. I was 7 or 8 and was mesmerized by the sound of a Stratocaster guitar coming through a Fender amp. At one point, I picked up the Strat and tried to play it. [Photo of Bergenfield, N.J., in the 1960s]
JW: What did your parents do for a living?
ADM: My mom was a traditional Italian-American homemaker. My dad was a builder.
JW: Were they musical?
ADM: Not really. For me, I loved listening to music and discovering new bands and records. Growing up in the 1960s was amazing. The decade was a revolution of new ideas. There really hasn’t been anything like it since in terms of music affecting and shaping a generation of kids and artists. So I was affected by everything going on around me, musically.
JW: Were your parents born in the U.S. or had they immigrated from Italy?
ADM: I know for sure that my mom lived in Italy up to the age of 13. I’m uncertain if she was born there or she was born here and then returned to Italy as a baby. I say this because her mom passed away from tuberculosis when she was very young. My dad was born here and had a very large Italian family. He had 13 brothers and sisters.
JW: Do you still have lots of relatives over for Sunday lunches?
ADM: We had a lot of that when I was growing up, especially over the Christmas holiday season and for special events.
JW: Did growing up with those events inspire your passion for food?
ADM: Oh my God, yes. My parents lived for Italian food and Italian restaurants. We loved the tradition of Italian food, and it was very much a part of their life. The enjoyment they got from life was through food.
JW: Speaking of Italian food, how did your Home Events idea come about?
ADM: Growing up, I'd watch my mom make pasta and cook. I learned that if you know the right ingredients for a dish and how it is supposed to taste, you're halfway there to becoming a cook or even a professional chef, if that's what you want to do. But it was music that I really wanted to pursue, not cooking. Coming up with the Home Events idea began during the first year of the Covid pandemic.
JW: Can you tell JazzWax readers what your Home Events concept is all about?
ADM: It started on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2020. We had invited an old friend and his wife to sit outside on our deck. I thought I’d give my wife, Stephanie, who's an amazing cook, a break. I said, “Look, let me do the cooking today. I have a dish that I know is going to blow them away. It’s a special dish of cavatelli pasta." It's really the ingredients that makes this dish unique.
JW: What happened?
ADM: I was feeling really good. It was a beautiful day and I’d been off the road for a long time, so I was super relaxed. It was one of the first times we'd had friends over since the start of the pandemic, so everyone was happy to see each other in person. I proceeded to make this dish. Midway through, I asked my wife to go livestream on our computer so that fans around the world could see what I was up to. Of course, I'd already had a couple glasses of wine, so I was feeling pretty good. At one point, I looked at the camera and said, “And if you want, you can come here, and I'll cook for you in person."
JW: Pretty risky given the world these days, no?
ADM: I was only joking. But later that night, we read the comments from people who watched. Many of them were asking if I was for real about that offer or was it just a joke. My wife and I looked at each other and the idea clicked. We thought, “Hey, wait a minute. Maybe we can do this as a side business—part charity, part business, and take this to another level." We came up with multiple price-point packages that included having them over for the experience of watching me cook, enjoying different wines and champagnes, and experiencing a tour of my house, which is like a museum because it's has all of my collection of things that I've acquired over the last 40 years or so. At the end of the night, for certain packages, we'd site down for a two-hour, three-course meal with Italian desserts. Then we'd go down into the studio and play a private recital, which is something I think Home Events guests really enjoy.
JW: Perfect strangers to your house for dinner and music?
ADM: That's it. Both of us said, “We just came up with a beautiful idea that I haven't seen anyone else do." I mean, anywhere. And it's not like we've read about any other artist doing it. I couldn't do this by myself. It's really a joint effort between me and my wife, and we love doing it for fans. And sometimes, I offer a jam or a lesson. One of our packages includes them getting their guitar signed. So there's three different packages in the home events.
JW: Did your parents listen to music?
ADM: There was a lot of music being played at our family home. I remember my dad having a lot of classical music and he had a Les Paul and Mary Ford record or two. But it was my sister who brought home 45s or albums of all the current hits on the radio. That’s how I was introduced to the Beatles. She brought home Meet the Beatles when it came out over the Christmas holiday in 1963. Listening to that album really changed my life. Then in February of '64, they were on the Ed Sullivan Show several times while they were in the U.S. for a couple of weeks. We watched that live. It changed the whole music scene for me and made me want to be a musician.
JW: Was Elvis Presley an inspiration, or his guitarist Scotty Moore?
ADM: Elvis was the first person I saw on TV with a guitar who caused that kind of excitement. He was a big sensation in my early years in the late 1950s.
JW: What was it about Scotty Moore and the Ventures that lit you up?
ADM: I loved the sound of an electric guitar and that old string reverb, which was so prevalent back then thanks to Scotty. Me and my buddies, we had bands, several different bands, where we played tunes by the Ventures. A lot of songs were spin-offs of Apache, by the U.K.'s Shadows. I loved playing that song, or the Ventures' Walk, Don't Run. And then the Rolling Stones arrived in the mid-1960s and we did their stuff.
JW: What else were you listening to in the mid-1960s?
ADM: I became a big country-rock fan—the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers and later, Crosby, Stills and Nash. It was an explosive time for music coming out of Britain, Los Angeles and San Francisco. I loved all those bands, including Moby Grape, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. It was the best era.
JW: Did your parents buy you a guitar for your birthday?
ADM: Yeah, I really expressed a strong desire. I was 8 or 9. Initially, when I was really young, they were hoping I would take accordion lessons. But by then, the accordion was a corny-sounding instrument to most of us. The electric guitar was the big thing. My parents wanted to start me on something inexpensive just to see if it would stick.
JW: What did they buy you?
ADM: A very cheap acoustic guitar, with the strings about two inches from the neck, making it really hard to play. But I was passionate about my journey to learn guitar. There was no let up on my part.
JW: Once you had the guitar, did you take lessons? Or did you learn the basics from books and records?
ADM: I started taking lessons at the local music shop, a place that only gave lessons. It was close to our home. I was assigned this teacher who was more versed in old-school jazz guitar. Even though I learned scales and chords and how to read music at an early age, I also learned some Beatles songs and stuff like that. I still have those books where the teacher wrote out the music.
JW: Who were your favorite guitarists by the early '60s?
ADM: My guitar teacher was my biggest influence. I thought he was just amazing. In the early '60s, I was still a young boy, but by 1967, I began to learn about new guys coming up, like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. But it wasn't until my teen years that I began to appreciate players who were phenomenal. At the Fillmore East in New York’s East Village, I got to see Pete Townshend with the Who and Carlos Santana.
JW: When did you start playing in a high school band?
ADM: I had several bands in high school, but not right away. I had one in my junior year. As I got into a deeper part of learning about the instrument, I wasn't really playing like the guys I used to go see because I was playing more scale-ular stuff rather than riff-based rock. I didn't really fit into those kind of bands by then.
JW: Were your parents worried about your passion for a music career?
ADM: When I was a teenager, my father leaned on me hard to go to school to learn a trade so I had something to fall back on. I refused to listen to him. I really knew what I wanted to do and didn't need a Plan B. So my parents saw my drive, which led me to Boston’s Berkeley School of Music after high school. There was no turning back.
JW: Was Berklee a big turning point?
ADM: Berkeley was great. I mean, it just was the next step in my education. Each of my classes there was designed to include the guitar. So I'd have to bring my instrument to each class. Everything applied to the guitar. It was very well organized in that sense. There were a lot of great players studying up there, too, so you were surrounded by them. I was very fortunate to go to to school up there. I wish I had been able to remain there longer, but I got my big break when I was pretty young.
JW: What happened?
ADM: Chick Corea heard a tape given to him by a friend of mine. Chick called me at Berklee and asked me to join the band. He said, “Our first show is at Carnegie Hall in a few days and we need a guitarist to join the band. We heard a tape of you that knocked us out." This friend of mine was an amateur recording engineer and had taken the tape to Chick and his manager and bugged them until they listened to it. The timing was perfect because the guitarist they had was leaving, so they gave a listen. It was really a matter of good timing and diligence on my friend's part.
JW: At Berklee, had there been a fusion curriculum at the time?
ADM: Not really, but everyone had their own sound influenced by the rock they were listening to. I was there at the beginning of the fusion era, which started to catch on in 1972. When I joined Chick’s band in 1973, audiences were beginning to get quite large. So yeah, we were at the forefront of a new idiom and it was exciting. The music was all about excitement. Of the three big bands that led the fusion movement—John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report with Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter and Return to Forever, Chick's band was probably the most compositional in terms of the content.
JW: Were you listening to hard rock guitarists at that time as well, to get the feel?
ADM: Not really, no. I was listening to guys who were more like the fathers of fusion. Players like Larry Coryell, who really started the whole movement by blending jazz with rock and country influences, and John McLaughlin. Someone I listened to a lot in college and is someone I really look up to is Ralph Towner, who's equally great on piano as he is on guitar. His way of composing has been a super big influence on me. I also listened to Alberto Guzmatti from Brazil. They're more on the acoustic side of things, but Larry and John in the early '70s were inspiring me to do my thing on the electric guitar. They were the pioneers.
JW: How did you come to love Mediterranean music?
ADM: I was born in an Italian dominated environment and grew up with all of my relatives. So Mediterranean music was all around me. I also was influenced by flamenco guitar and Paco. All of the countries on the Mediterranean have different types of folk music that evoke the image of that region.
JW: How did you discover Paco?
ADM: I was on tour with Return to Forever in 1974. When we arrived in Spain, there was a lot of talk about this hot new guitarist, Paco de Lucia. I discovered him because I was curious. I bought a few of his records in Madrid. When I returned home, I played them. He was taking the idiom to another level. I had this idea in the back of my mind of doing something with him. That's when we actually put it together.
JW: So, Friday Night in San Francisco was a big turning point for you, career-wise, yes?
ADM: I would say that the turning point had already occurred as a result of Return to Forever. But this concert was another great event along the way.
JW: Which five albums in your discography would you recommend as a gateway to your music?
ADM: Elegant Gypsy was the quintessential album of my early years. It also was the introduction of Paco and myself doing a duet called Mediterranean Sundance. Soon after came Friday Night in San Francisco with John and myself. That album sold something like 7 million copies. I've recorded more than 30 albums that I think are at a high level, artistically. Infinite Desire might not be as big a seller as those other ones, but I love it. I also love Kiss My Axe. Those are great production records, on which I play both electric and acoustic. I love Pursuit of Radical Rhapsody and the new record I'm working on. I'm also proud of my two Beatles tribute albums—All Your Life (2013) and Across the Universe (2020).
JW: What do you think of Saturday Night in San Francisco?
ADM: I've been very fortunate to have artistic freedom to do what I want and really work on my records until I'm proud of them. And so that's what I have here. I hope people love this new record as much as I do. It's the early Al, you know? I've grown a lot since then, so there's a different Al now. But it was good to get this music documented so that people can hear where we were at our best back then.
JazzWax clips: Here's Splendido Sundance from the new album...
Here's Al, Paco and John on tour in 1981...
This story appears courtesy of JazzWax by Marc Myers.
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