Carlos Santana Biography
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Carlos Augusto Alves
Santana (born July 20, 1947) is a Mexican guitarist, originally from
Autlán de Navarro, Jalisco.
He became famous in the
late 1960s and early 1970s with his eponymous band Santana, which
created a highly successful blend of salsa, rock, blues, and jazz fusion
Their sound featured his high-pitched, clean guitar lines set against
Latin instrumentation such as timbales and congas. Santana continued to
work in these forms over the following decades, and experienced a sudden
resurgence of popularity and critical acclaim in the late 1990s. Over
his career he has sold an estimated eighty million albums worldwide.
* * *
*
Early life and career
Carlos Santana's father was
a mariachi violinist and young Carlos learned the violin originally, but
switched to the guitar when he was eight years old. After a family move
to Tijuana, Santana began playing in clubs and bars; he remained in
Tijuana when his family moved to San Francisco, California, but soon
joined them.
At the end of 1966, Tom
Frazier (guitar) wanted to form a new rock band. Frazier joined Carlos
Santana (guitar/vocals), Mike Carabello (percussion), Rod Harper
(drums), Gus Rodrigues (bass guitar), and Seattle native Gregg Rolie
(organ/vocals), to form the Santana Blues Band. After a while the name
was shortened to just Santana. Promoter Bill Graham saw them and the
band debuted in June 1968 at the legendary Fillmore (later Fillmore
West), where many of the great San Francisco bands began. Santana's
recording debut occurred on The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and
Al Kooper with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield.
Santana to Caravanserai
Soon signed to Columbia
Records, the band released a largely instrumental, self-titled album,
Santana in 1969. The group at this point consisting of Carlos Santana
(guitar), Gregg Rolie (keyboards and vocals), David Brown (bass guitar),
Michael Shrieve (drums), José "Cepito" Areas (percussion) and Michael
Carabello (percussion).
On the tour to support the
album, the band played at Woodstock Music and Art Festival. They were
one of the surprises of the festival; their set was legendary, and later
the exposure of their eight-minute instrumental "Soul Sacrifice" in the
Woodstock film and soundtrack albums vastly increased Santana's
popularity. Santana became a huge hit, reaching number four on the U.S.
album chart, and the catchy single "Evil Ways" reached number nine on
the Billboard Hot 100.
In 1970 the group reached
its early commercial peak with their second album, Abraxas, which
reached number one on the album charts and went on to sell over four
million copies. The innovative Santana musical blend made a number-four
hit out of English blues-rockers Fleetwood Mac's "Black Magic Woman",
and a number-thirteen hit out of salsa champion Tito Puente's "Oye Como
Va". Abraxas has since been placed on several "best albums of all time"
lists. The classic Santana lineup of their first two albums was inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
Rolie and Santana started
going different ways musically, however. Santana wanted to move toward
more ethnic Latin pieces, while Rolie was more influenced by the
progressive rock movement, wanting to highlight more keyboards into the
music, and play long instrumentals. The progressive movement pushed for
longer songs, thematically linked music across all of the songs on an
album, and used heavy influences of classical music. Carlos wanted
shorter songs, the influence of the music of Mexico and his family
heritage, with heavier emphasis on percussion.
Because of Woodstock and
the success of the first two albums, the band started to disintegrate.
1971 saw major changes in the band and its lineup.
A teenage San Francisco Bay
Area guitar prodigy, Neal Schon, was asked to join the band. He was also
asked by Eric Clapton to join Derek and the Dominoes. Choosing Santana,
he was brought into the studio to help clean up the "success mess",
brought on by the band's new-found fame, Schon helped complete the third
album, Santana 3. Schon, with a classical music background, was also
more inclined to lean toward progressive rock (and at the same time he
was helping Santana, he formed the band Azteca with Larry Graham, which
eventually after further changes became Graham Central Station).
In any case, Santana 3 was
another success, reaching number one on the album chart, selling two
million copies, and spawning the hit singles "Everybody's Everything"
and "No One to Depend On".
After Santana came back
from a South American tour, which was cut short in Peru when all their
gear was confiscated, they started working on a new, fourth, album,
Caravanserai. During the studio sessions in December 1971, Rolie decided
that it was time to go. He left and went home to Seattle, opening a
restaurant with his father, and later became a founding member of
Journey.
When Caravanserai did
emerge in 1972, it was with individual credits on each track, and marked
the end of Santana as a band with a fixed membership. It also marked a
strong change in musical direction towards jazz-rock fusion. As such it
earned considerable critical praise.
Decline in popularity
Now using the name Devadip
Carlos Santana, bestowed upon him by spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy,
Carlos Santana's next project was Love Devotion Surrender, a
collaboration with jazz-rock guitarist and fellow Chinmoy disciple John
McLaughlin. Backed by musicians from both Santana and the Mahavishnu
Orchestra, the album was a tribute to John Coltrane filtered through
joint spiritual ecstacy; critical and popular reactions were mixed.
Carlos Santana used the
Santana name and a series of changing musicians to continue to tour
around the country, releasing several albums. Santana had five top-forty
singles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with "Winning" in 1981 and
"Hold On" in 1982 both reaching the top twenty.
Many albums followed in the
1970s and 1980s, including collaborations with Willie Nelson, Herbie
Hancock, Booker T. Jones, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and The Fabulous
Thunderbirds. In 1988 Santana won the Grammy Award for Best Rock
Instrumental Performance for Blues for Salvador. In 1990 he left
Columbia Records after twenty-two years and signed with Polygram. In
1991, Santana made a guest appearance on Ottmar Liebert's album "Solo
Para Ti", on the songs "Reaching out 2 U" and a cover of his own song,
"Samba Pa Ti".
Return to commercial
success
Santana's record sales in
the 1990s had been very low, and towards the end of the decade he was
without a contract. However Arista Records' Clive Davis, who had worked
with Santana at Columbia, signed him and encouraged him to record a
star-studded album with mostly younger artists. The result in 1999 was
Supernatural, which included collaborations with Rob Thomas of Matchbox
20, Eric Clapton, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, and others.
The first single was
"Smooth", a dynamic salsa-ish stop-start number co-written and sung by
Rob Thomas, and laced throughout with Carlos's guitar fills and runs.
The track's energy was immediately apparent on radio, and was played on
a wide variety of station formats. It spent twelve weeks at number one
on the Billboard Hot 100; a music video set on a hot barrio street was
also very popular. Supernatural started selling in large numbers and
reached number one on the album chart; suddenly Carlos Santana was the
comeback story of the year. The follow-up single, "Maria Maria", also
reached number one and spent ten weeks there. Supernatural eventually
sold over 15 million copies in the US alone, making it Santana's biggest
sales success by far.
Supernatural and the
different tracks on it then won nine Grammy Awards, including Album of
the Year, Record of the Year for "Smooth", and Song of the Year for
Thomas and Itaal Shur. Santana's acceptance speeches described his
feelings about music's place in one's spiritual existence.
In 2002, Santana released
Shaman, revisiting the Supernatural format of guest artists including
P.O.D., Seal, and others. Although the album was not the runaway success
its predecessor had been, it still produced two radio-friendly hits: the
infectious "The Game of Love" featuring Michelle Branch reached #5 on
the Billboard Hot 100 and spent many weeks at the top of the Billboard
Adult Contemporary chart; then "Why Don't You and I" featuring either
Chad Kroeger from Nickelback or Alex Band from The Calling (the original
and a remix with a different singer were combined towards chart
performance) also reached the Hot 100 top ten. "The Game of Love" went
on to win the Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals.
In 2005, Herbie Hancock
approached Santana to play on, as well as to help in gathering other
artists to record, an album similar to Supernatural. The resulting
album, titled Possibilities, was released on August 30, 2005, featuring
Carlos Santana and Angélique Kidjo on "Safiatou" (track 2).
* * * *
Live at the Fillmore '68
(released 1997)
Santana (1969)
Abraxas (1970)
3 (1971)
Caravanserai (1972)
Carlos Santana & Buddy
Miles Live! (1972; C.S. with Buddy Miles)
Love Devotion Surrender
(1973; C.S. with John McLaughlin)
Welcome (1973)
Lotus (1973)
Illuminations (1974; C.S.
with Alice Coltrane)
Santana's Greatest Hits
(1974)
Borboletta (1974)
Amigos (1976)
Festival (1976)
Moonflower (1977)
Inner Secrets (1978)
Oneness: Silver Dreams,
Golden Reality (1979; C.S.)
Marathon (1979)
Zebop! (1979)
The Swing of Delight (1980;
C.S.)
Shango (1982)
Havana Moon (1983; C.S.)
Beyond Appearance (1985)
Viva Santana! — The Very
Best of Santana (1986)
Freedom (1987)
Blues for Salvador (1987;
C.S.)
The Very Best of Santana
vols 1 & 2 (1988)
Persuasion (1989)
Latin Tropical (1990)
Spirits Dancing in the
Flesh (1990)
Milagro (1992)
Nineteen Eight-Six (1993)
Sacred Fire: Live in South
America (1993)
Soul Sacrifice (1994)
Santana Brothers (1994;
C.S. with Jorge Santana & Carlos Hernandez)
As Years Go By (1994)
Santana Jam (1994)
Every Day I Have the Blues
(1994)
With a Little help from My
Friends (1994)
Jin-Go-La-Ba (1995)
Dance of the Rainbow
Serpent (1995)
Evil Ways (1997)
Jingo (1997)
Between Good and Evil
(1998)
Awakening (1998)
Supernatural (1999)
Jingo Maniac (2000; C.S.)
Mother Earth 2000 (2001)
Nuclei/2 (2001)
Shaman (2002)
Ceremony: Remixes &
Rarities (2003)
Jammin' Home (2004)
All That I Am (2005)
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URL of Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Santana
Date Article Copied:
September 16, 2005
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