Carlos Santana:
Musical Migration
by Neil Leonard
www.neilleonard.com
published in Rhythm Music Magazine, Cover Story
Volume 3, Number 8, August 1994
Twenty-five years ago, a wiry, goateed guitarist, barely twenty-two, took to the stage at Woodstock, N.Y. Many in the audience were unprepared for what they were about to hear, as the young man had yet to put out his first record and was largely unknown outside of California. Carlos Santana closed his eyes, threw back his head, and wailed, tearing notes off his guitar in a tone that would make him famous: it was fat, distorted, biting, warm, unbelievably sustained. Behind him, a conga and timbale player joined in, laying down a polyrhythmic groove that was impossible to resist. It was a new sound from an almost instant guitar hero who would soon join the ranks of headliners like Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix, bringing with him a fiery rhythmic infusion. It was hot, it was Latinbut it rocked.
Santana will be performing this August at the upcoming Woodstock 94. We wanted some of the original Woodstock performers, said co-producer John Scher, but we wanted only those original acts that are still relevant, that continue to make music and records. Santanas record sales have leveled off in recent years, but his continued relevance is indisputable. He has sold over thirty million albums, and is one of only eight acts whose albums have entered the Billboard Top Ten LPs in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. On a recent Latin American tour, he outsold Guns N Roses two to one, drawing crowds of eighty thousand, a tribute to his unique success at blending Latin rhythms with American rock and roll.
Yet Santana has never thought of himself as a crossover artist. He is truly an American phenomenon, and claims the blues as his deepest source of musical inspiration. Like many of the old blues players, he has an almost instinctive way of connecting to people, a way of reaching out by looking in. I dont think of trying to impress these people or those people, to touch these people or those people, he tells me on the phone from San Francisco. I just try to touch myself. I think if I touch my heart, you are going to be touched. If I dont touch me, why should you be touched by me?
Carlos Santana was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and took up violin at age five with the help of his father, a Mariachi violinist. Though fascinated by his fathers ability to make each note sing, young Carlos soon rejected Mexican music, dismayed by the drunken brawls and macho competitions favored by the local enthusiasts. Instead, he turned to the North American pop music that he was hearing on the radio. Carlos switched to guitar at age eight. At eleven, he left home and dropped out of school to play in Tijuana cabarets.
A fellow guitarist from TJ and his Tijuana Band turned Carlos on to B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Little Richard, and Ray Charles, but the big blues and R&B acts never reached Tijuana. Two years later, Santanas parents took him to live with them in San Francisco. There he shunned the surfer music and Beatles favored by his friends and again went in search of the blues, which his friends thought old-fashioned. Seeing Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield at Winterland put him in a daze for weeks, and he soon formed his own group, the Santana Blues Band.
Though deeply affected by African-American music, it was to the white bluesmen that Santana turned as a primary source of material. Musicians like Butterfield, a mean harmonica player, along with guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop, were part of the nascent blues revival of the sixties. They were young white men who frequented Chicagos South Side blues clubs, drawn by the fame of men like Muddy Waters. Muddy Waters was a giant, a pioneer of plugged-in blues who trained an entire generation of black musicians and influenced countless whites, from Paul Butterfield to The Band, Johnny Winter, and the Rolling Stones.
Butterfields first album, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, was immensely influential: his amplified harmonica and Bloomfields guitar (with Mark Naftalin on organ, instead of piano) added up to white, urban blues with no apologies. Santana himself made his first recording with Bloomfield and organist Al Kooper on The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper.
But while black audiences had always danced to the blues, Santana needed something to get white audiences on their feet. He kept the blues flavor of guitar, bass, and organ, and brought in Chepito Areas, an Afro-Cuban via Nicaragua way, to play congas. The congas were as new to Carlos as to many of his audience. The congas came in later in my life, I didnt grow up listening to them. I thought that anything to do with congas was corny, ruffled shirts, that kind of stuff. But the congas got people dancing. The timing was perfect. People just wanted to dance, and thats what congas do. We were hitting on different parts of your body than anyone else was hitting.
The Latin sound distinguished the Santana Blues Band from the local psychedelic music scene, led by bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The group shortened its name to Santana and soon became one of the Bay Areas hottest dance bands. Santana began playing shows at Bill Grahams Fillmore West auditorium, billed alongside names like Taj Mahal, the Youngbloods, and Melanie. The band was picked up by Columbia Records, and a debut album was in the works. Three months before its release, Santana played Woodstock.
Santana stood out at the festival as the only bandleader who was born and raised in the Third World; he came at a pivotal moment in rock history, and his audience was in the most receptive of moods. While musicians like Hendrix and Richie Havens also had conga players, no other group brought such an intense Cuban sound to the stage. The percussion solo on Soul Sacrifice turned many of his listeners on to Latin music for the first time. Ironically, their parents had danced to some of these same rhythms in their courting days, only this time the big-band trappings were replaced by electric guitar, Fender bass, and Hammond organ, with congas and timbales in addition to the standard trap set. Latin music had had its effect on jazz; now it was hitting rock and roll.
Within three months the band released its first album, Santana, which went platinum in a year, then double-platinum. Santana included the hit song Evil Ways, which blended a modal, salsa-like vamp with electric guitar and English lyrics. Jingo was a cover of Jin-Go-Lo-Ba from the influential Drums of Passion album by Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Although Santanas main direction has always been Latin-flavored music, his cover of the Olatunji tune presaged later collaborations with musicians such as Salif Keita from Mali and Toura Kunde of Senegal.
Their next album, Abraxas, produced two of Santanas biggest hits. Black Magic Woman was based on the same formula as Evil Ways, with the addition of a Doors-like intro on electric organ. The song was written by Peter Green, one of the four founding members of Fleetwood Mac, originally a British blues combo very unlike the phenomenon they were later to become. Oye Como Va, by Cuban timbale master Tito Puente, was sung in Spanish, and featured Santanas searing guitar work over a backing that could have been recorded by a New York salsa band. Abraxas, which went triple platinum, was followed in similar vein by the less successful Santana III. Throughout, Santana found a way to integrate the blues without recording a single blues standard on any of the albums.
The band changed direction with their largely instrumental next album. The first track on Caravenserai was called Eternal Caravan of Reincarnation, which opened with the sounds of crickets and a Middle Eastern style melody played on phase-shifted saxophone. Then an acoustic bass entered, followed by drummer Michael Shrieve, sounding like he had been listening to jazz drummer Elvin Jones. The Hammond organ was replaced by tremolo-drenched acoustic piano, and Santana played percussion instead of guitar.
Santanas commitment to the Afro-Cuban groove was evident in the addition of Armando Peraza, a master percussionist from Cuba. Armando is all the way from the inside, Santana says. He is a walking encyclopedia. In Peraza, Santana found a soloist who could challenge the bandleader himself. He is the Charlie Parker of bongos, its that simple.
Santana was getting more into jazz, an interest that went back to the inclusion on Abraxas of Gypsy Queen, by guitarist Gabor Szabo. Santana went to see guitarist John McLaughlin in a New York City jazz club and was awestruck at his complex, high-energy form of fusion. McLaughlin had just finished working with Miles Davis and was playing with two Miles alumni, Tony Williams on drums and Larry Young on Hammond organ. He had been studying the odd meters and intricate harmonic nuances of Indian music, to which he had been exposed by musicians like Badal Roy who had passed through Miles band. McLaughlin had also found a guru, Sri Chinmoy.
All this made sense to Santana. It was a time when musicians everywhere, from the Beatles to John Coltrane, were drawing inspiration from spiritual leaders. Coltranes 1964 recording, A Love Supreme, attributed his success in kicking a long-standing bout of heroin to a spiritual awakening, in marked contrast to the heavy drug abuse by many jazz musicians of the 40s and 50s. Santana himself was coming out of a period of recreational drug use and was looking, besides, for new musical inspiration. McLaughlin, for his part, was delighted to introduce Santana to his music and way of life. He suggested that Santana meet Chinmoy, and that the two guitarists do an album together.
The cover of Love, Devotion, and Surrender showed Devadip Carlos Santana and Mahavishnu John McLaughlin standing on either side of Sri Chinmoy, his arms over their shoulders and his notes filling the albums inner sleeve. Santana had cut off over a foot of hair and traded in his necklaces and snakeskin platform shoes for neatly-pressed white clothes. The album opened with Coltranes A Love Supreme and also included his Naima. The musicians included Jan Hammer on keyboards and Billy Cobham on drums, both alumni of McLaughlins Mahavishnu Orchestra. The album was filled with guitar pyrotechnics, and Armando Perazas congas were mostly buried in the wash of sound.
Santana learned a lot from the jazz crowd, and drew a number of their ranks into his band, like former Miles drummer Ndugu Leon Chandler and Szabos keyboardist, Tom Coster. But Love, Devotion, and Surrender represented a low point in Santanas career for many of his fans, a period in which he seemed to have lost sight of his unique melodic voice. He got this feedback even from concerned jazz musicians. When Santana was working on his Illuminations album with Coltranes widow, Alice Turiya Coltrane, on harp, bassist Reggie Workman spoke up. You ought to look at what youre doing, he said. A lot of people look up to you, listen to your music. Its not so important, getting into Coltrane. Get into yourself.
Sometime during the tour for Love, Devotion, and Surrender, Santana went to see guitarist Elvin Bishop and realized how much he missed the blues. Once he got over the anxiety of touring with the cerebral, lightning-fast McLaughlin, he realized he could move people as much or more with only a fraction of the notes. Beginning with Amigos (1976), and continuing with Festival (1976), and the platinum Moonflower (1977), Santana had far fewer instrumentals, and kept the tempos at a good pace for dancing.
Moonflower was Santanas last platinum album. The second part of his career has been marked by less restlessness and greater personal balance. Though his music is no longer ground-breaking, he has still been extremely active, recording more than a dozen albums, touring all over the world, collecting awards and gold records. His talents have also been much in demand by fellow musicians.
Everybody knows I am not a tourist, so they call me, whether its the African musicians from Paris, or people in South Africa, or Puerto Rico, or Cuba. Believe me, when I go to Chicago and the phone rings as soon as I open the door, and Buddy Guy says, Come on over, Otis Rush and I are waiting for you, that, to me, is everything.
Santana has always been careful in the settings in which he chooses to play. Once he even refused an opportunity to sit in with one of his idolsMiles Davis. I refused because he was playing in this club in New York with [drummer] Jack DeJohnette and [pianist] Keith Jarrett. They were playing basically acid music. I dont mean acid jazz, I mean just acid music, like where you shove a microphone under running brook water. It was really, really out there, it was outer than Frank Zappa. It was good, its just that I didnt know how to build with those blocks. I am a melody-theme guy. Maybe I can take more chances now, but back then I said, Man, what is this stuff? It sounded more like the elements instead of notes, so I said, Next time.
The gig with Miles did eventually come about. We played in 87 at the Amnesty International. I sat in that day with Ruben Blades and the Neville Brothers and Miles. Instead of bringing my band, I had asked Bill [Graham] to bring Miles to the concert. Bill called me at 2:00 in the morning and said, I know its late but I had to call you. Miles Davis said yes, hes going to play! The following year Santana toured with another Davis veteran, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, co-founder of Weather Report.
Santana is equally choosy about his recordings with other musicians. I dont want to be dipped into anybodys album. I want to be like Bob Dylan says, Ill let you be in my dream if I can be in yours. That is how I work with people. Im not going to give you a cold-fish handshakewhats the point? The embrace has to complete, or dont even shake my hand.
The best of Santanas music has always done just thatembraced you, lifted you to your feet, got you dancing. He makes no distinction between dance music and serious music, but seeks only to touch his audience in some very real way. I want my music to stimulate the listener to go beyond life. This is not entertainment. When I was a kid, I saw dogs riding a motorcycle. Thats entertainment. Madonna, Copperfield, people like that, thats entertainment, phony-baloney, paper-mache Hollywood. Music that I know is just close your eyes, and the next thing you know, you are in Africa or Jerusalem. People are listening, they dont fight any more, Palestinians and Hebrews, they dance together. In San Quentin [penitentiary], Mexicans, Indians, blacks, Latinos, everybody, they dance together, including the warden and the guards, after the fourth song they dance together. They move just like blades of grass in a field, they move together to the sound of the music. Thats all I want to do.
Neil Leonards compositions have been performed at the Audio Arts Festival (Poland), the Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York) and Carnegie Hall. Leonard teaches multimedia and music synthesis at Berklee College of Music.
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