FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Santana - Abraxas
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FOR this Vinyl Corner…
IN THIS PHOTO: Carlos Santana/PHOTO CREDIT: Tucker Ransom/Getty Images
I am including a legendary artist that I have not spoken about much. The legendary Carlos Santana is renowned as one of the most influential and important artists and guitarists ever. His band, Santana, have released some sensational albums. Carlos Santana turns seventy-five on 20th July. To honour that, I am featuring the band’s 1970 masterpiece, Abraxas. Go and get the album on vinyl if you can. It is a sublime and extraordinary album that features songs like Oye Cómo Va and Black Magic Woman (a Fleetwood Mac cover). It is an album that I would encourage everyone to listen to. I am going to come to a review of Abraxas soon. Before that, Consequence took a dive into the band’s second studio album in a feature from 2020:
“To fully appreciate Abraxas — that is, to believe it’s some portended, almost-mystical force of nature … or at least a longshot to have topped the charts for six weeks back in 1970 — requires a brief look at how the planets aligned for Carlos Santana and the band’s classic lineup: Gregg Rolie (lead vocals, Hammond organ), Michael Shrieve (drums), Michael Carabello (congas, percussion), and José “Chepito” Areas (timbales, congas, and percussion). A mere two years after famed promoter Chet Helms had told Santana that a Latin-infused rock band couldn’t succeed and that the guitarist should return to his day job as a dishwasher, the band had scored a record deal, cut their self-titled debut, and catapulted into the public’s imagination with an appearance at Woodstock. The now-iconic documentary Woodstock even features an infomercial-length jam session as the band jubilantly sync rhythms with the masses during a sprawling rendition of “Soul Sacrifice”. It’s one of the weekend’s most memorable moments and part of the reason audiences were both hip and open to Santana when their largely instrumental debut came out just two weeks later.
A little more than a year later, Santana found themselves about to release their sophomore album, Abraxas. Their debut, which would go platinum twice over, had been a top-five album, and their hypnotic cover of jazz percussionist Willie Bobo’s “Evil Ways” had scored them a top-10 single and would go on to become a founding staple of modern classic-rock radio. All of a sudden, the unlikely Latin-blues collective from San Francisco were internationally known and sought after. Santana now had to worry about blisters on his fingers rather than dishpan hands, but also how to follow up such unexpected success and handle new levels of expectation. The answers to that dilemma seemed to flow through the guitarist himself.
Abraxas would be its own beast (as the opening track’s title might suggest), flesh adhering to bone through a mix of Carlos Santana’s interests, influences, and a series of serendipitous moments. For instance, the cover art of Abraxas features the 1961 painting “Annunciation” by German-French artist Mati Klarwein. Santana had just happened to have seen the painting in a magazine and made an inquiry. Not only has the album cover gone down as one of the most iconic in rock and roll history, but Klarwein would go on to design for many other artists, including one of Santana’s personal heroes, Miles Davis. These types of whims that turn into the stuff of legend seemed to pile up around Santana in those early years. It makes one begin thinking that we were somehow always destined to be talking about Abraxas 50 years later.
Like so much of Santana’s best work, Abraxas finds its way into our bloodstream. In a band with three percussionists and one of the most innovative blues guitarists of all time, reason stands that the music’s entry point might be to tap into our pulse as it does in the opening, dance-inducing drumming on Santana or to strike a nerve via a melodic guitar groove that manages to be infectiously sweet one moment and sharply penetrating the next. Neither is the case here, though. As Abraxas stirs, and “Singing Winds / Crying Beasts” slowly awakens, the opening song’s titular winds pass through chimes and find passage into our lungs. It’s everything that opener “Waiting” wasn’t just an album earlier. Gone is Gregg Rolie’s swirling, hurricane organ; the percussion’s locked-in, insistent throb; and the incendiary sprint to the finish. Instead we have menacing keys that wander, hushed percussion that sounds like thunder rolling in the distance, instruments mingling and fading out like guests making rounds at a cocktail party, and a tension that builds from restraint rather than a rising. It’s Santana and band breathing through us, demonstrating that they have more than one way to commune with an audience”.
It is worth wrapping up with a review from Rolling Stone. An undeniably huge and vastly impressive albums, I don’t think one needs to be a fan of Latin and Chicano music to vibe to and get involved with Santana’s brilliance. Abraxas is an album that every person can feel something for. The impact of the songs will be felt instantly:
“Carlos Santana is one of the three new guitarists who border on B. B. King's cleanliness. His only two contemporaries are Eric Clapton and Michael Bloomfield, but Santana is playing Latin music and there are no other Latin bands using lead guitars. The paradoxical thing about Santana has been their acceptance by a teenybop audience that digs Grand Funk and Ten Years After when they should be enjoyed by people who are into Chicago and John Mayall.
The heart of Santana is organist Gregg Roli and bassist Dave Brown, who hold the rhythm together over which the percussion unit can jam and bounce. Timbales, congas (Puerto Rican) and drums take off on Brown's rhythm and then Santana himself comes in to make his statements on lead guitar.
Carlos Santana is a Chicano and he loves the guitar, which has always been used heavily in Mexican music. He has perfected a style associated with blues and cool jazz and crossed it with Latin music. It works well, because the band is one of the tightest units ever to walk into a recording studio. Of white bands, only Chicago can equal their percussion, but Chicago is held together by horns, while Santana is held together by timbales and congas.
"Oye Como Va" is the highlight of the album. It's only weakness is that Roli's fine organ has been mixed too low. This is a different trip for Santana, much more into the styles of the younger Puerto Rican musicians in New York, like Orchestra DJ and Ray Olan, and farther from the Sly trip that dominated their first album. Unless you really dig Latin music or some of the middle period work of Herbie Mann and the Jazz Messengers, you may not enjoy this cut or the album at all.
Abraxas is one of the new independent productions for Columbia done at Wally Heider's studio, and bass player Dave Brown did much of the engineering. The album he has helped to come up with may lose Santana some of their younger audience, but is bound to win them respect from people interested in Latin jazz music. On Abraxas, Santana is a popularized Mono Santamaria and they might do for Latin music what Chuck Berry did for the blues.
The major Latin bands in this country gig for $100 a night, and when you see them, you can't sit still. If Santana can reach the pop audience with Abraxas, then perhaps there will be room for the old masters like La Lupe and Puente to work it on out at the ballrooms. But for now, Abraxas is a total boogie and the music is right from start to finish. (RS 73)”.
One of the very finest albums ever, Abraxas is one that sounds brilliant on vinyl. It is one I remember first hearing when I was a child. I adore the songs and the performances from the whole band (though it is Carlos Santana’s guitar work that particularly sticks with me!). If you do not own this on vinyl, then I would steer you towards it, as it is…
WORTH the money.