Guido Di Leone was a Bari guitarist, teacher and club director who spent four decades as the center of jazz in Puglia. He was born on January 24, 1964, in Bari, the son of the jazz pianist Nino Di Leone, and died in Bari on November 11, 2025, at 61, after a sudden illness; English Wikipedia gives the cause as a heart attack. Italian Wikipedia places his style in the modern mainstream, and from the start he leaned toward the sound and repertoire of Jim Hall. His first album as a leader, All For Hall, was recorded in July 1990 and released in 1991 on Splasc(h) Records with bassist Attilio Zanchi, drummer Ettore Fioravanti and trumpeter Paolo Fresu, and it was dedicated to Hall.

The records that followed put him alongside established names in Italian jazz. Scherzo (1993, Penta Flowers) added saxophonist Claudio Fasoli and vibraphonist Saverio Tasca to the trio. He played guitar on singer Tiziana Ghiglioni's Spellbound (1996, YVP Music) beside Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Cazzola, and the front of his own Hearing A Rhapsody (1995, Modern Times) names Zanchi, Ghiglioni, Mark Murphy, Bob Mover and Paola Arnesano; Discogs does not itemize that record's personnel. Arnesano, a Bari singer, became a recurring partner, on records ranging from Memorie D'Italy (1996) to the guitar-and-voice duo Ventiseifebbraioduemilauno (2002) and Trio De Janeiro (2006).

Much of his life's work was done at home, in Bari. He founded the music school Il Pentagramma in 1985 and ran it for about forty years, and he founded and directed the Duke Jazz Club, attached to the school. Italian Wikipedia credits him with founding the label Fo(u)r Edition, which issued much of his catalog, and he taught jazz guitar in the academic courses of the Niccolo Piccinni Conservatory in Bari from 2004 to 2014; local press also places him teaching at the Matera conservatory. He also wrote Metodo facile e completo di Teoria Jazz (Sinfonica Jazz / Carisch, 2002). In the Bari scene he was equally a bandleader and an organizer: Con Alma Trio, with organist Vito Di Modugno and drummer Mimmo Campanale, was described at his death as one of the longest-lived jazz formations in Puglia, and it made Meets Jerry Bergonzi (2016, Abeat Records) with the American tenor saxophonist.

The Bari albums drew visiting and Italian names. Four Friends In Bari (2012) paired him with trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso. Sax Line (2009) put a four-saxophone front line in front of his guitar, including Daniele Scannapieco and Gaetano Partipilo. In 2020 he recorded Tribute To Jim Hall with the New York guitarist Peter Bernstein, bassist Dario Deidda and drummer Andy Watson. With Deidda he also made Lonely Flower For You (To Jim Hall) (2016) and the live duo In Duo (2023). On other people's records he appears with Gianni Basso in Bari (2003), on Nicola Conte's Jet Sounds (2000) and Garota Moderna (2002), and behind pianist Dado Moroni and trumpeter Bosso on bassist Giuseppe Bassi's We'll Be Together Again (2002).

A second strand, in Brazilian music, ran through his life alongside the jazz. Beginning with Terra Do Sol Abrasileirado (1998), he returned to bossa nova, samba and Italian songs, most often with the singer Francesca Leone, his wife: Tudo Em Bossa Nova (2019), Coração Vagabundo (2021), Historia Do Samba (2023, with the Oneiros String Quartet) and Aquele Abraço (2025, Abeat For Jazz).

His last trio session was recorded on May 27, 2025, at Mast Recording Studio in Bari, with bassist Deidda and drummer Joey Baron. It came out on Abeat Records on March 27, 2026, as Promenade, produced by Di Leone and credited to the Guido Di Leone Trio. His funeral was held on November 13, 2025, at the Church of the Sacro Cuore in Bari, and the mayor of Bari, Vito Leccese, described him as an elegant musician, composer and arranger and a sensitive teacher.

Di Leone's home idiom was the mainstream guitar tradition of Jim Hall. Jazzitalia's obituary describes what he took from Hall as a balance between guitar playing, harmony and swing. He kept returning to Hall's music, from All For Hall (1991) to Lonely Flower For You (2016) and Tribute To Jim Hall (2020), and to Hall pieces such as "All Across The City" and "Waltz New." Other tributes are named in his track lists, among them "To Wes" on Hearing A Rhapsody, "Mr. Montgomery" on Con Alma (a nod to Wes Montgomery) and "Composed On Piano For Mal Waldron" on Isole, a record for guitar and brass ensemble.

He worked in several settings: organ trio with Di Modugno and Campanale, quartet and septet dates for Philology and Fo(u)r Edition, a duo with a bassist, vocal duos, and a guitar orchestra at his school. The Brazilian repertoire, with nylon-string guitar on Historia Do Samba, was a distinct second voice rather than a departure: Jobim, Elis Regina and bossa nova standards sit beside Italian songs in those programs.