“A tear thru Al’s musical evolution, showcasing his virtuosity and vision”: Al Di Meola spent four years crafting his most original album – and its first single is a fusion-meets-flamenco masterclass

Al Di Meola has launched Twentyfour – the jazz fusion virtuoso’s first studio album in four years, which has been previewed by its lead single, Fandango.

Following 2020’s Across the Universe, Di Meola’s most original studio LP has been in the works for the previous four years, with its origins rooted in the tumultuous cases of the pandemic.

Owing to its prolonged building duration, Twentyfour started out as a humble reflective acoustic album, but quickly became something fully different, as Di Meola himself supposedly struggled to “resist the charm of boundless musical exploration”.

As such, the yarn in the end blossomed into “a masterpiece”, per its PR – one which serves as “a tear thru Al’s musical evolution, showcasing his virtuosity and vision”.

With all that mentioned, Twentyfour is positioned to be a huge liberate for every Di Meola and the broader guitar world, and all signs point in direction of the jazz virtuoso handing over on the intellectual hyperbole with the liberate of Fandango.

As expected, Fandango is a tour of Di Meola’s technical prowess, as neatly as a cloak of his outstanding melodicism and compositional sensibilities. The seven-minute acoustic cut is charged with an up-beat urgency, layering a punchy bed of galloping double-tracked guitars with some nylon-string musings.

Flamenco-y alternate selecting traces and rolling finger-strummed progressions portion the observe with about a of Di Meola’s extra mainstream fusion traces, delicately woven into the combo.

“Overjoyed to drawl the blossom of my unique single Fandango, the first flower in the bouquet of songs that manufacture up my upcoming album Twentyfour,” Di Meola wrote on social media. “This fusion of flamenco and jazz is nice the foundation of the magnificent wild meadow I’ve cultivated over the closing four years.”

Indeed, as Fandango clearly reveals, Twentyfour seems to be to be to be like to be a quintessential cloak of Di Meola’s penchant for combining every thoughts-bending methodology and unparalleled compositional nous – something that the guitarist values in his, among others’, playing.

“It’s one thing to procedure up with hundreds of rapid gripping traces which in itself is gripping,” he as soon as instantaneous Guitar World, “but it’s one other thing to model how this will probably be utilized interior the context of a composition, and that is something that doesn’t poke hand in hand.”

Twentyfour is accessible to preorder now earlier than its liberate on July 19.

In other Al Di Meola info, the fusion maestro returned to the stage in January for the first time this 300 and sixty five days since suffering a coronary heart attack on stage in September 2023.