Carlos Santana is living proof that the most important thing in guitar performance is the energy and the feeling you have while playing… And that that energy will inevitably transfer from your inner being – to the audience. A little more than the knowledge of the pentatonic rock scale, with occasional use of the harmonic and the natural minor – is all Carlos ever used. It is obviously absolutely enough to perform and enjoy in one big part of the beauties the guitar has to offer. His career started in 1969, and this song “Samba Pa Ti” was recorded just a year later, in 1970, and became quite a hit.
Carlos Santana played with literally every famous musician, (predominantly singers) on the world pop scene in the last 5 decades. His music, first with his Santana band, is made of very simple rock and Latin guitar solos, with the very intensive use of Latin percussion. From Congas & Bongos, as the center of the Latin percussion world, towards all possible other types of Latin percussion. His concerts were often including a wide variety of musicians on the stage, together at the same time. So the sound was grandiose although the arrangements are were mostly simple. They are written for a classical simple Latin pop band, mostly…
During the times of the rock and roll revolution, his and his wife’s guru Sri Chinmoy accepted them as disciples in 1973. They were introduced through John McLaughlin. Santana was given the name “Devadip”, meaning “The lamp, light, and Eye of God”. The goal was to meditate because the various versions of the bands dissipated due to the drug abuse problems. But Carlos was a natural-born leader, and his career continued into the 21st century just as nothing happened.
His music career has so many events, that we have no time to dedicate to it in detail. The goal here is to enjoy the feeling and the mood of the song from the early period of his creativity. The new stuff is just too commercialized. I personally rarely listen to it, because his latest works are mostly performances with someone from a totally different genre of music…
But, in the end, it is really like Santana says, “it’s a feeling that somehow just takes over so that and I am not aware of what is happening and I just go with the flow…”
