Philzone.org Discussion Board: Archive 2004: Non-PF/Dead Show Reviews Archive 2004: Dimeola, clarke, ponty aka rite of strings 10/20/04 carmel, CA

fairly well attended. a fair amount of empty $75 seats. they played for about two hours--well maybe the better part of 100 minutes, anyway. first two pieces, indigo and song for john [coltrane] filled up the better part of a half hour. thought this was billed as a mostly acoustic show--not exactly sure if al's MIDI triggering synth drum patches qualifies as 'acoustic', but hey whaddya gonna do?

al's guitar solo part seemed based around three themes, but went on a tad long, jean-luc dedicated his to the program director (R.I.P.) of the monterey jazz fest as that was the american concert debut for ponty years ago, and stanley clarke's was ripping....

they rounded out the show with a couple more pieces. all in all a good show. the 'new' sunset center is quite the multi-million dollar improvement over the 'old'

wow - Stanley Clark was a favorite bassist back in the day for me; I got into JLP because of his playing w/ Zappa, and DiMeola, is, well, Al DiMeola. One of my favorite albums of all time is DiMeola/DeLucia/McGlaughlin - Saturday Night Live in SF.

Didn't know that these 3 heroes were touring together - I'll have to see if they're going to play any NYC area dates.

>>>One of my favorite albums of all time is DiMeola/DeLucia/McGlaughlin - Saturday Night Live in SF.

Me too. Last weekend I was in a used book store in the Strip District. Found a book, Rolling Stones Guide to the Top Jazz Records for $1.98. It basically goes through all jazz artists and rates their albums on a one to five star basis. That album only got two stars which really shocked me. Thats a five star for me.

Nice review Spearman!

Well, it's not much of a jazz album per se. If anything, it's a flamenco album, but really, it's just a tremendous acoustic guitar record. Not likely to be rated all that highly as a jazz album, IMO, and apparently, Rolling Stone's opinion, either.

It could be a 5 star just for the engineering alone. Back in the days of vinyl and big old headphones, I used to sit in the basement listening to the 3 guitar lines jump back and forth from right channel, left channel and hybrid center, mirroring the position of the 3 players on stage. Awesome. Passion, Grace, and Fire was a dang good studio album w/ the same personnel, but just not the same as hearing them play the Pink Panther theme live.