Al Di Meola has announced 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 latest studio LP has been in the works for the past four years, with its origins rooted in the tumultuous times of the pandemic.
Owing to its lengthy development period, Twentyfour started out as a humble reflective acoustic album, but soon turned into something completely different, as Di Meola himself supposedly struggled to “resist the allure of boundless musical exploration”.
As such, the record eventually blossomed into “a masterpiece”, according to its PR – one that serves as “a journey through Al’s musical evolution, showcasing his virtuosity and vision”.
With all that said, Twentyfour is positioned to be a sizable release for both Di Meola and the wider guitar world, and all signs point towards the jazz virtuoso delivering on the colorful hyperbole with the release of Fandango.
As expected, Fandango is a tour of Di Meola’s technical prowess, as well as a display of his remarkable 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 picking lines and rolling finger-strummed progressions share the track with some of Di Meola’s more mainstream fusion lines, delicately woven into the mix.
“Thrilled to announce the blossom of my new single Fandango, the first flower in the bouquet of songs that make up my upcoming album Twentyfour,” Di Meola wrote on social media. “This fusion of flamenco and jazz is just the beginning of the beautiful wild meadow I've cultivated over the last four years.”
Indeed, as Fandango clearly shows, Twentyfour looks to be a quintessential display of Di Meola’s penchant for combining both mind-bending technique and robust compositional nous – something that the guitarist values in his, among others', playing.
“It’s one thing to come up with a lot of fast interesting lines which in itself is interesting,” he once told Guitar World, “but it’s another thing to see how it will be applied within the context of a composition, and that is something that doesn’t go hand in hand.”
Twentyfour is available to preorder now ahead of its release on July 19.
In other Al Di Meola news, the fusion maestro returned to the stage in January for the first time this year since suffering a heart attack on stage in September 2023.
