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ynthesizing Carlos Santana’s (& Co.) oeuvre and importance would require rivers of ink or trillions of pixels (whichever your preferred medium is) and a brain much better organized and knowledgeable than mine, so I won’t even try.

Santana’s music is ancient and yet contemporary, finds its roots in those of the human race itself and evolves with the passing of the time like people have done for millennia.

The music is immediately recognizable, just like you know who is using the plectrum as soon as this hits the snare.

Carlos Santana is a magnificent guitarist, with a deep sensibility, both musically and empathically, born and raised in Mexico, which explains his inclination and love for South-American rhythms and harmonies, which are intelligently interlaced with more northern jazz and blues influences.

His career started as roadie for Los Tj’s, a pioneering blues and rock-and-roll band from Tijuana, where Carlos encountered his musical influences from the North.

Once he moved to the US, in California, he found himself immersed in the growing hippie movement and the liberating turmoil of the 60s, which culminated in their historical performance at the Woodstock festival, whose soundtrack and subsequent movie launched Santana into the firmament of the highest ranked bands of the period.

Their first studio album was called, simply, Santana and saw the light in 1969 with what will be the “basic” and most legendary formation that will stay practically unchanged for quite a few albums, featuring Carlos Santana ( guitar, backing vocals), David Brown (bass), Gregg Rolie (lead vocals, Hammond organ, piano), Mike Shrieve (drums), Michael Carabello (congas, percussion) and José “Chepito” Areas (timbales, congas, percussion).

After this success, their second album, Abraxas (1970) will reach such a popularity that probably every household with at least one resident teenager would own a copy. The album contains three of Santana’s tracks that even people picked up randomly on the streets would probably recognize: Black Magic Woman, Oye Cómo Va and Samba Pa Ti.

It’s now that Santana’s music will transcend the initial “latin” inclination and can be mustered under more universal parameters; the music shines of its own light that seems to come from within.

Their third Santana III (1971), also known simply as III, redefines the boundaries of their music, aiming to a more jazz-fusion sound.

But the real (musical) revolution comes with the superb Caravanserai (1972) which originates on Earth and moves out into the Universe, in a pulsating wave of coherent sound, suspended between dream and reality, a music that tries to deliver us a glimpse of the Absolute to make it tangible, something we can feel and hear with our own senses, creating a complex and incredibly fascinating album.

The next Welcome (1973) embroiders further on the canvas laid out by Caravanserai. The basic ensemble is expanded with the addition of Tom Coster (keyboards, percussion), Richard Kermode (keyboards, percussion), Douglas Rauch (bass), Armando Peraza (percussion), Leon Thomas (lead vocals), together with guest musicians like Alice Coltrane (piano), Wendy Haas (vocals), Flora Purim (lead vocals), His August Guitarness Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Joe Farrell (flute), Bob Yance (flute), Mel Martin (flute), Douglas Rodriguez (rhythm guitar), Tony Smith (drums), and Jules Broussard (soprano sax).

The jazz-fusion matrix is expanded into more complex rhythms which, in my humble opinion, are unable to reach the same peaks as Caravanserai, which I personally see as Santana’s highest and unmatched musical product.

It’s soon after his meeting with John McLaughlin that Carlos Santana becomes involved in the search of spirituality that McLaughlin was already experiencing and they both team up to produce a magnificent album: Love, Devotion, Surrender (1973) which deserves a little off-topic mention.

In here, both guitarists explore the meaning of the three stages of enlightenment, with particular attention to the last “Surrender”, not intended as in its more western meaning of “defeat”, but as something diametrically opposed; in the words of their guru Sri Chinmoy:

“Unfortunately, in the West ‘surrender’ is misunderstood. We feel that if we surrender to someone, he will then lord it over us… But from the spiritual point of view… when the finite enters in the Infinite, it becomes the Infinite all at once. When a tiny drop enters into the ocean, we cannot trace the drop. It becomes the mighty ocean”.

Unfortunately, the album was not favorably accepted by the traditional Santana audience and in fact Tom Jurek will define it as a “hopelessly misunderstood record in its time by Santana fans”.

Nevertheless, it is probably the musical testimonial of Carlos Santana spiritual conversion, which will permeate all his future compositions.

In 1974 Borboletta is released and it will further build on the jazz-funk-fusion started with Welcome, expanding further the concept of body and mind, finite and infinite and represents the evolution of the spirit within the matrix of the natural Earth, hence not technology.

Many more albums will follow (as far as 2021 with Blessings and Miracles), while Carlos Santana will grow into one of the most famous and celebrated musicians on the Planet.

All well and good, but if a whole musical universe can be told by just a handful of LPs, what is the point of relaying every single step of the travel up to the ten-Grammy-Awards-later present day?

We just thank dear Devadip for his gentle contribution to our musical sanity of mind  and wish him wisdom and prosperity.

Nothing more; nothing less…

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