As an artist, sometimes you have to go back to your roots to move forward.

Across his nearly 40-year career, virtuoso guitarist Patricio Morales has deeply explored many musical styles, working with some of the most revered and innovative names on the North American and European music scenes. But with the making of La Tierra Canta, his astonishing third album, the Emmy-winning composer had the conscious goal of reconnecting with the continent of his birth.

“After spending so many years playing other kinds of music — jazz, rock, classical — I wanted to make something more exotic,” says the Chilean-born Morales, who recruited exceptional musicians from five Latin American countries to collaborate with him on the recording. “I’m from South America, and I wanted the feel of this album to be South American. I’ve lived many places, but the music from that part of the world still sounds exotic to me.”

The sparkling, all-original, nine-song La Tierra Canta (“The Earth Sings”) is lush, mysterious, and richly seasoned with the journeyman Morales’s sublime skills as both an instrumentalist and a composer. It’s an album that, as its name hints at, unveils a new musical world — one that is exquisite, expansive, and endlessly layered — with every visit.

The gorgeously melodic and instantly memorable title track opens the shimmering set. “‘La Tierra Canta’ is one of the first songs on the album that I wrote,” says Morales about the playful piece, which is sugared sweetly throughout by Vitor Goncalves’s fleet accordion. “When I came up with the main melody it revealed to me that I was really onto something.” Indeed, he was, and that sense of discovery and adventure pulses with vibrant color throughout the record. Its name a fitting nod to Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Realismo Magico” is another of the album’s many stunners. The heady tune unspools with an easygoing Latin rhythm and dissolves into a mysterious, dream-like improvised section before finishing out with a smooth tropical groove. “Armando,” an intricately constructed samba that moves from major to minor modes, was inspired by a dream Morales had about a mentoring older cousin; likewise evocative of his below-the-equator upbringing is the haunting “4 De Diciembre,” whose origins are bittersweet. “There’s a little sadness in that one,” he explains about the song, which aches with powerful poignance and longing. “I was feeling a little nostalgic for my family, a little homesick, when I wrote it.” With La Tierra Canta’s finale, “Keep in Touch,” however, the mood turns decidedly joyful, with the closing cut’s lilting, sung melody taking the album out on an uplifting, hopeful note.

Raised in the Santiago area and in rural Chile, Morales became interested in music via Anglo-American classic rock — Led Zeppelin, Santana, and Janis Joplin were early favorites — and the folk-based, politically charged nueva canción music that arose across South America in the 1950s and 1960s. He got his first guitar at age 14 and connected with a circle of older jazz musicians who turned him onto Keith Jarrett, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and, most notably, Oregon guitarist Ralph Towner, who would have a profound impact on his musical course. He was inspired to go to New York in 1981 to make his mark as a musician. “When I first came to New York, I still didn’t really speak English,” says Morales, who attended SUNY Purchase, studied classical guitar at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and immersed himself in the intoxicating downtown scene, where he befriended artist Al Diaz, the close collaborator and friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat. “I was like a little bird, just watching everything in wonder, soaking it all up.”

In 1987 Morales met his hero Ralph Towner in New York following a concert there. There was an immediate creative connection between the two, and he soon moved to Seattle with the idea of enrolling at Cornish Institute, where Towner was on the faculty. But instead of studying at Cornish he ended up taking private lessons from the Oregon founder, who was so impressed with the younger guitarist that he took him under his wing and invited him to accompany his legendary group on tour. Morales released his debut album, Tierra Del Fuego, in 1989, and through his connections with Towner also studied with the likes of Gary Peacock, John Abercrombie, Colin Walcott, Paul McCandless, and Nana Vasconcelos. He next emigrated to Switzerland, where he worked with local musicians, toured Europe, and eventually pursued making music for television and film. By 1991 he was back in Chile, where he launched the nationally popular “Tambores y Bajo” radio program and recorded his second album, 1994’s Doble Sol. After returning to Switzerland, Morales stepped up his library music career, creating tracks for network TV’s “As the World Turns,” “One Life to Live,” and “All My Children” — winning a 2013 Emmy Award for his work on the latter program.

But despite his success in the lucrative world of small-screen composing, after nearly two decades of it he nevertheless felt creatively unfulfilled. “I said, ‘Enough of TV — back to the guitar’,” recalls Morales, who in 2015 relocated once again to the New York area, where he has served on the music faculty of Marist University and presently teaches at Bard College Conservatory of Music. In 2022, he began recording sessions with the Grammy-nominated pianist and accordionist Goncalves, bassists Sebastian De Urquiza and Pablo Menares, drummer Rodrigo Recabarren, percussionist Rogério Boccato, mandolinist Daniel Zamalloa, and arranger Juan Andrés Ospina. The result is a collection of music that’s as cinematic as his soundtrack work — but in a completely different way. “La Tierra Canta weaves Patricio’s soulful guitar and deep Chilean roots into a vivid musical landscape,” raves his fellow guitar great Brad Shepik (Carla Bley, Charlie Haden, Joey Baron). “It’s rich and heartfelt.”

Arriving over 30 years after the release of his last album, it’s been long in the making. But, as Morales notes, “You can’t force the music.” It’s true: The music goes when it wants, where it wants. And on La Tierra Canta it goes to some beautiful, amazing places.