Of all the places a musician can have a health emergency, nowhere is more public than the stage. Which is where guitar virtuoso Al Di Meola found himself on the evening of September 27, 2023, performing a concert in Bucharest, when he suffered a heart attack.
“It happened right in the middle of a song,” Di Meola tells Guitar Player from Miami. “Some photographer from the Associated Press [Dragos Cristescu] who just happened to be at the show as a fan caught me right at that moment, just as I was slumping over my acoustic guitar and grabbing my chest. That’s when, like, two or three seconds later, I had to remove myself from the stage because I knew something very serious was happening."
Despite his condition, Di Meola managed to get himself offstage before his illness became apparent to the audience. “Yeah, I walked offstage, but not very well,” he says. “And then I collapsed behind the curtain, and I was laying there. And then the intensity of the pressure on my chest was beyond anything you could stand. You know, I was moaning like a hurt animal.
"When they told me in the ambulance I was having a heart attack, I wasn’t super shocked. I was more disappointed. I remember thinking, This might be it for me.
“And then I thought of my wife and my daughter, and I got emotional. ’Cause I really enjoy my new family so much — my beautiful wife, Stephanie, and my wonderful little girl, Ava — that I just didn’t want to leave. I said to myself, This can’t be happening. I want to see my daughter graduate. So I was waffling between the emotion of that and then the harsh reality of, Well, I guess this is it. I guess this is what it’s like to be going out."
Once Di Meola arrived at Bagdasar-Arseni Emergency Hospital in Bucharest, the medical team sprang into action. "They put nitroglycerin under my tongue, which alleviates the pain immediately," he says. "Then we went to the operating room immediately. Everything was happening real fast. And I just did what they said. I said, ‘Look, doc, do whatever you have to do. Just save me.’
“And I remember laying there thinking, I know this is going to hurt like a bastard, and I don’t care. I’m ready for whatever it is. Just go. Of course, I didn’t know how they were going to do it, but I figured I’m going to feel pain like I never felt before. But honestly, without anesthesia it was no pain at all, because there’s no nerves inside where they inserted this tube in my leg that connected up to the arteries.
“And it saved my life, everything was successful. And my guy here, who is a very well-known cardiologist in Miami, read their report and said that they did a phenomenal job.”
"Everything was happening real fast. I said, ‘Look, doc, do whatever you have to do. Just save me!' "
—Al Di Meola
Remarkably, Di Meola was back in action and on the road by January 2024 for the preliminary shows for his Electric Years tour, featuring keyboardist Philippe Saisse, master percussionist Gumbi Ortiz, drummer Luis Alicea and bassist Elias Tona. The stint saw him performing music from his early success with Return to Forever, as well as selections from his first three solo album: Land of the Midnight Sun, Elegant Gypsy, and Casino.
“I’d say I was at 80 percent. It was not 100 percent,” Al says of his guitar playing on those early dates. “And that’s not that people noticed or anything, but I knew that I had more healing to do then.” Taking a break from that tour, Di Meola played a series of acoustic concerts with a trio in Europe — “all sold-out shows in venues that I had played 10 times before but never sold them out,” he says. “And I think the heart attack... Who knows? It may have helped sales in a weird kind of way.”
None of this stopped Di Meola from releasing his latest recording, Twentyfour, this past July. Four years in the making, it’s Di Meola’s 40th album to date and primarily an acoustic outing (played on his Felipe Conde signature series nylon-string acoustic with a cutaway), with electric guitar blended in on five of the 15 tracks.
“This album started out as what was to be a solo nylon-acoustic guitar record,” Di Meola says. “It was going to be something simple, production-wise, and something heavily composed. But I didn’t want to get bogged down by inviting a lot of musicians and doing tons of production, I wanted to keep it simple.
"But the time that I had was far greater than I thought, and so it just naturally developed from there. The temptation was too great to not add harmonies here and then other instruments there and then some orchestra pieces as well.
“So it turned into something much greater than my original intention. And I paid for it.”
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