Al Di Meola, Yoshi’s SF, Feb. 8th.

Awesome! Four Stars.

Friday Night in San Francisco or Slendido Hotel. I wasn’t sure which style to expect. Turns out, we got both.

The food was good, but the place is a giant corporate monstrosity. The service seemed rushed and impersonal. We were herded from one place to another, like a Disneyland vacation.

We got very good seats though, in the second row, just ten feet from the stage which was littered with various acoustic and electric guitars and percussion instruments.

I ordered a Laghroig and she got a Sazerac.

Al came out, all in black and picked up the nylon stringed acoustic. He sat in front of a stack of sheet music and a single microphone. The sounds that came from his guitar varied from classical acoustic to fully electric with distortion and everything had a fusion feeling. One of his most used sounds used a layering of pads and a steel drum like attack. It sounded cool, but left me dry. the accordion player was fantastic. You could tell that Al had a special affinity for that instrument and a genuine appreciation for his talents.

They tore it up and everything was going just fine. He was just as amazing as I expected, but just after about the fifth song the room went completely dark and all the sound conked out. Some emergency lighting came on in a few seconds but it was clear the music was to be put on hold for a time. The musicians walked off the stage and there were a few announcements. they were working on it, and then it seemed the whole block was down, not just the club. I went to the bathroom and stretched and talked to our neighbors and everybody was perplexed. The club people looked genuinely worried and stressed.

And then something completely fabulous happened. Di Meola came out from behind the red curtain with his guitar in hand, followed by the rest of the band, and he announced, Well, we are going to play anyways. And this was followed by a huge round of applause.

They pulled all their chairs up to the front of the stage, all but the bass player who had been playing an unfortunate electric upright, and Al played just a few chords to see if we could hear. it was very quiet and it was not at all clear if it was going to work, but they were prepared to try and we all were prepared to remain quiet enough to hear.

The people in the front row offered the musician’s some nibbles off their plates and they passed around a beer another table offered up. It got laughs. There was still some ice in the room but it was breaking and melting.

Then they started to play and it broke my heart. You had to remain very quiet to hear everything but it was glorious. The accordion player barely pumped his bellows not to overpower the two quieter guitars on stage. He employed various improvisational techniques, like pumping the air through the bellows without any notes, kind of wash or a pad sound. He scraped the side of his instrument and wacked on it a few times for rhythm. The conga played banged on a wooden bongo. the drummer rattled some shakers and only once got up to vibrate a cymbal right at the end of a song for punctuation. It was a moment. Everyone was hanging on every note and every unrehearsed investigation.
When they got to Mediterranean Sundance the place became unglued. The accordion guy somehow traded lightning fast riffs and kept up with the melody. It was glorious and was greeted with a standing ovation. Al said at the end of it, I know Friday Night in San Francisco is a favorite around the World, but I will always remember this Sunday night in San Francisco.
Of course we gave him a standing ovation and he came out for two more, and made another short speech after that saying that San Francisco had always been very good to him, but this one will definitely go down in the books.

Transcendence.