As a precocious teenager, Al Di Meola cut his musical teeth playing guitar with Chick Corea's pioneering electric band Return to Forever, which he joined in 1974. The instrumental quartet created a potent and propulsive mix out of rock, Latin music, and jazz, and the guitarist's debut with the group, Where Have I Known You Before, quickly became one of the classics of fusion. Di Meola performed with RTF for a couple of years, then created his own group, writing tunes inspired by Corea's multifaceted approach.

“Of the three fusion groups that started the movement—Return to Forever, Mahavishnu [Orchestra], and Weather Report—thanks to Chick I think we were the strongest compositionally,” says Di Meola, reached in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he was born and raised. “Playing strong and challenging instrumental pieces really helped form the growth period for my own way of composing.”

But in time Di Meola came to realize that fusion just wasn't moving him. “The music didn't hit my heart,” he says. “It didn't bring me to the depths of the feelings I might get from certain classical music, or what I experienced when I first heard Astor Piazzolla.”

Di Meola met the late Argentine master of nuevo tango when both were touring Japan in 1985. “Everyone in his group was very warm. It was like meeting long-lost friends or my Italian relatives. His dates and mine often coincided. We kept talking and hanging out, and developed a strong friendship. Piazzolla's music was so emotionally wide-ranging and at the same time technically difficult and challenging. He promised to send some charts and a piece to do my own thing with.”

Di Meola recorded “Tango Suite” with the first edition of World Sinfonia, the band he formed to take his original music in more of an acoustic, global, and soulful direction, and to explore the new possibilities opened up for him by Piazzolla. “World Sinfonia primarily plays my own compositions, but I can't picture ever not doing some Piazzolla, because it's so close to me.”

The two artists found much in common. Both had parents who emigrated from Italy, and as a boy Piazzolla spent seven years in New York. The Argentine master revealed something his compatriots would rather keep quiet.

“Piazzolla told me tango originated in Napoli [Naples] and at first had nothing to do with Argentina, though it developed there. That resonated strongly with me because the connection is very profound—and here I am now with two Italians in World Sinfonia. Our music is a combination of jazz improvisation and many different Latin rhythms, which we syncopate. That distinguishes it from other renditions of tango. It has all that I always liked most in fusion but on a much wider palette.”

Al Di Meola's World Sinfonia plays the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Monday (June 29).