WORLD SINFONIA: HEART OF THE IMMIGRANTS

Gorgeous second effort by Di Meola's World fusion project that continues with the delicate but passionate music started on the first record. The sounds of Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Africa, and the Atlantic Islands are represented but wrapped in Di Meola's finesse and beautiful sounding guitar. Nothing like his jazz-rock and perhaps a bit dry for his old fans, but if you're looking for something different in its stunning passion and atmosphere, this is a welcome second entry for the World Sinfonia.

If you are looking for drab pseudo-ethnic sounding elevator music, the kind that permeated the easy listening world from the mid-eighties on (thanks alot, Paul Simon), this is not for you. Mostly.

Despite this album featuring a bandoneon, a type of accordion (usually a clear warning of "Caution: Elevator Music Ahead", except for a few songs, this one does not fall into that category.

The compositions are primarily energetic and inventive, and the performances, as befitting a Di Meola album, are up to the task. Many of the songs, despite the acoustic instrumentation, easily fall into the progressive fusion category. Especially enjoyable to me is "Carousel Requiem", which does bring to mind a deranged carnival or circus.

The album does lose steam towards the end, beginning with "Someday My Prince Will Come", played a bit too schmaltzy for my ears, and continuing on with "Cafe 1930", which does have that maudlin elevator style I lamented above.

But for the most part, I find this to be a very enjoyable album.

A wizard of the World

The musical career of Al Di Meola is a diverse one. Heart Of The Immigrants is the second album out of three that he made as part of his World Sinfonia project and it is a surprisingly enjoyable effort with lovely guitar work in interesting musical contexts. This is not progressive Rock and neither is it by any means Jazz-Rock like his early solo albums or his work with Return To Forever. Indeed, this is not any kind of Rock at all. But it is surely "progressive" in some sense and Jazz is indeed one of many different styles involved here. You could perhaps call this World Music or World Fusion as implied by the title of the project, but I don't think that quite captures what this music is about. Di Meola blends different styles, primarily different Latin styles such as Tango but also Classical music which makes him sound a bit like Steve Hackett (another one of my favourite guitar heroes) on the latter's Classical albums. The music here is mostly calm and soothing, but there are several outbursts of fast and intense guitar playing and some dramatic changes.

The guitars are all acoustic but the album as a whole is not entirely acoustic as there are some keyboards in the mix too. Other prominent instruments are bandoneon (Spanish accordion?) and strings. There are vocals on one track, but the rest of the album is entirely instrumental apart from some discrete word-less vocalizations on several tracks. A few of the pieces here are by tango master Astor Piazzolla, while others are Di Meola compositions.

This kind of music might not appeal to all fans of progressive Rock, but for anyone with a taste for Latin guitar styles and virtuoso acoustic guitar playing this is highly enjoyable and quite original. One possible criticism of this album is that it is too long. Some moments towards the end do sound like just more of the same and the impact of the album as a whole would be greater if some tracks were cut.

Still, this is a good but hardly essential album