Friday Night In San Francisco

Friday Night in San Francisco is a live album by Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco de Lucía. It was recorded live at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, CA on December 5 in 1980. The album is considered an iconic recording and was described by jazz author and critic Walter Kolosky as “a musical event that could be compared to the Benny Goodman Band’s performance at Carnegie Hall in 1938… [it] may be considered the most influential of all live acoustic guitar albums.” Al Di Meola is an acclaimed Italian American jazz fusion and Latin jazz guitarist, composer, and record producer. He experienced a celebrated career that has spanned four decades and earned him critical accolades, three gold albums and more than six million record sales worldwide.

Di Meola has amassed over 20 albums as a leader while collaborating on a dozen or so others. John McLaughlin, also known as Mahavishnu, is an English guitarist, bandleader, and composer. He is a pioneer of jazz fusion, combining elements of jazz with rock, world music, Indian classical music, Western classical music, flamenco, and blues. He received multiple “Guitarist of the Year” and “Best Jazz Guitarist” awards from magazines such as Downbeat and Guitar Player and was ranked 49th in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. Jeff Beck called him “the best guitarist alive”. Paco de Lucía was a Spanish virtuoso flamenco guitarist, composer, and record producer. He was one of the first flamenco guitarists to branch into classical and jazz. De Lucía was noted for his fast and fluent fingerstyle runs and gained popularity outside Spain after collaborating with McLaughlin and Di Meola. Richard Chapman and Eric Clapton described de Lucía as a “titanic figure in the world of flamenco guitar.”