Posted by 
On January 16th, 2025 I found myself heading south from my mom’s winter place in New Port Richey to the Ruth Eckert Hall in Clearwater. With a half-dozen zigs and zags to navigate on the dark and mysterious Florida highways and byways I temporarily suspended my anti-GPS stance and dutifully followed the loud and impersonal orders barking from the car’s sound system.
Have I ever told you how much I generally despise Global Positioning Systems? Sure I occasionally relent, but only in the direst of situations.
I had never been inside the Ruth Eckert Hall before and I was looking forward to seeing it. That and the relatively low ticket price of $50+fees was enough to convince me to book a single ticket for Al Di Meola, a jazz/fusion guitar maestro whom I had seen on three occasions before; once doing the Guitar Trio stuff with Paco de Lucía and John McLaughlin, once all by himself, and once with Chick Corea and the Return To Forever gang. So you’d think I’m a fan but I’m not really.
At least I wasn’t before this concert. But wait…I’m getting way ahead of myself here.
So after about forty-five minutes the GPS machine got me to the Ruth Eckert Hall where I found the large and very spacious parking lot utterly empty. Huh? I parked and approached Will Call to pick up my ticket and they were closed. Wha? Something was definitely wrong. I decided to circumnavigate the building; perhaps the actual entrance was on the other side (an impossible hope if there ever was one). As I walked I wondered. This is Thursday night, right? Yes…I had checked into my flight already so it must be Thursday. Was the concert actually next Thursday? No; I had received an “info about your event tonight” email from Ruth Eckert Hall earlier that afternoon. Clearly I was at the wrong place.
When I circled back to the box office I was relieved to see a bin full of flyers that listed upcoming concerts. I grabbed one and was shocked to see that the Di Meola show was taking place at something called the Bilheimer Capitol Theatre!!! Huh?!? Wha?!? I ran to the car and punched it into the GPS.
Calculating…calculating…
The theatre was 6.6 miles away. It was 7:33. It looked like I was going to make it. And then I hit every. single. red. light. along. the. way. At 7:48 I still had three miles to go. It was a nail-biter but the traffic picked up and I ended up making it to the theatre with five minutes to spare. Found the last available parking spot right next to a No Parking sign, didn’t even think of looking for a pay-for-parking machine and ran to the ticket booth. Got my ticket and made it to my seat five minutes before the concert started. Whew!
You won’t see me type this very often, but thank-you GPS!
I was seated on the far left of the fifth row. The Bilheimer was a nice theatre with a small balcony, the place holds probably about 800 people. I struck up a conversation with a couple of guys sitting behind me. “My wife doesn’t like live music,” one of them said, “so I saved $109.”
“How did you save $109?” I asked. “Were you going to buy her a t-shirt?”
“I did buy her one,” he said, holding up two shirts. “But the tickets cost $109.”
“Mine didn’t cost that much,” I remarked, digging out my stub. “See? My ticket was $50 plus fees.”
“What?!?! Are you a member or something?!?” buddy next to him asked. “No,” I replied, “I’ve never been here before.” I even had the purchase info with me. “I bought the ticket on December 2nd,” I added, to which the guy behind me remarked with exasperation, “I bought mine less than a week before that!”
The lady sitting next to me asked if she could see my ticket stub. She showed it to her partner and after a shrug handed it back to me. Then the lights went down.
Al Di Meola walked onstage flanked by a quartet of sidemen: a young, solid bass player, a slick and slippery keyboard player, and a drummer/percussionist duo who together would have stolen the show, had Di Meola not played so remarkably well.
From the outset this show was fire. The music was tight and complex, calmly aggressive, and absolutely cluttered with melody. The one thing I remembered from seeing Di Meola in the past was his breakneck speed, which had seemed to me like a cover for some lack of creativity. However, my close proximity and apt attention showed me that I had been wrong; Al Di Meola’s speed is not only in service of his creativity, his relentless velocity was at the heart of his creativity. In the past I had blinked and missed it, but this time I sat there with my eyes (and ears, and musical palette) wide open.
And it was all great.
Early in the set Di Meola spoke about playing with Chick Corea back in the day. “Chick told everyone in the band to start writing their own songs,” he explained. “I had never written a song before. Heck, I was only twenty years old and still living with my parents…”
(That threw me. To think of playing with one of the premier fusion groups in history while still responsible for taking care of chores around mom and dad’s house…”Al, before you leave on tour make sure you make your bed and take out the garbage…”)
“As a matter of fact everyone in the band released a solo record while we were in Return To Forever, and this next song is the first song I ever wrote.” I can’t tell you what the song was called but I assure you it was one heck of a first effort.
There was a setbreak, after which Di Meola played a few solo acoustic numbers, including a very odd, angular, and supercool version of Norwegian Wood (This Bird has Flown), which was a major treat. Then it was back to full-band cerebral jazz fusion until the final bows came during well-deserved and uproarious applause.
During the show I had spent more time than I wanted to worrying about whether I should have paid for parking and about whether or not I’d find a big metal boot on the car after the show. Though I figured that would be disastrous I somehow managed to convince myself that it was something to worry about after the show. Fortunately it wasn’t, and after the show my only concern was the forty-minute GPS treasure hunt to my mom’s snowbird driveway.
Todd Man Out 