Santana's Lotus @ 50

"Commercial suicide"? Maybe, but the music was incredible...

Santana - Lotus (2017 deluxe edition)

Before we begin, two links:

• My latest Ugly Beauty column for Stereogum kicks off with a long piece on Last Exit, Bill Laswell’s jazz/metal/improv quartet with Peter Brötzmann, Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson, whose catalog has doubled thanks to a half dozen archival live releases on his Bandcamp page. I also review new albums by Kamasi Washington, Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers, David Murray, and others. Here’s the link.

• Also on Stereogum, I take the brave critical stance — with evidentiary support (there’s a 30-track playlist attached) that Lenny Kravitz Is Good, Actually. Here’s that link.

Look, sometimes you gotta just lay down a marker, so that’s what I’m gonna do. For about a half dozen years, from 1969 to 1974, Carlos Santana and his band made some of the most exciting, boundary-breaking, progressive music this planet has ever seen. Period. They were one of the four or five best bands on Earth during that era, and the peak of this creative journey came in May 1974, with the original release of the Japan-only triple live LP Lotus. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about this week.

Carlos Santana was born in Jalisco, Mexico in 1947, but raised in Tijuana and later San Francisco. He first broke out in 1969, when his band—at that point called the Santana Blues Band—played the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival before their debut album had even been released. Their fusion of Latin rhythms, powerful blues-rock riffing and extended guitar-keyboard jams quickly made them a massive live draw, and their first three albums (a self-titled debut, 1970’s Abraxas — which featured the hits “Oye Como Va” and “Black Magic Woman” — and 1971’s Santana III) all sold extremely well, with the latter two each hitting No. 1 on the Billboard charts.

By the time of Santana III, though, the band had already been through multiple lineup changes, and Carlos Santana’s personal interest in jazz, particularly the electric music of Miles Davis and the spiritual explorations of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, was pulling him in a new musical direction. The fourth Santana album, 1972’s Caravanserai, inaugurated an entirely new era of his career, one that would take him in radical and unexpected directions over the course of the next three years.

Caravanserai literally begins with the sound of crickets. This deliberate quiet is about as far from the blaring Latin rock of the first three albums as it’s possible to get. Santana himself doesn’t even play on the first track, “Eternal Caravan of Reincarnation”; it’s a spacy jazz piece reminiscent of Pharoah Sanders’ “Astral Traveling.” All but three of Caravanserai’s songs are instrumentals, and the nine-minute album closer, “Every Step of the Way,” features an orchestral arrangement by jazz trumpeter Tom Harrell. Columbia Records did what they could to promote the record, sending one of the few vocal numbers, “Just In Time to See the Sun,” to radio, but it wasn’t a hit.

Santana’s spiritual journey only grew deeper and more introspective from there. He became fascinated by the music of fellow guitarist John McLaughlin and his new band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and when the two men met, McLaughlin introduced Santana to the teachings of Indian guru Sri Chinmoy.

In his autobiography, The Universal Tone, Santana wrote, “That last week of October [1972], John and Eve [McLaughlin] took Deborah [King, his wife from 1973 to 2007] and me to meet their guru for the first time… the inner voice said, ‘You are a seed. A seed needs sun, water and soil. Together you will be able to grow and give divine fruit to humanity’… By the time I opened my eyes, I knew Sri’s teaching was meant to be my path. Sri could see that, too. There was no contract to sign or handshake or anything like that. There was no official welcome — just Sri standing in front of me, smiling and saying, ‘I take you; I accept you. If you want, I take you as my disciple. But you’ve got to cut your hair and shave your beard.’”

He did so, adopting a short hairstyle not unlike McLaughlin’s own and an all-white wardrobe. Chinmoy gave him the Sanskrit name “Devadip,” which he began using on his solo album covers (and which he asked his crew to address him by on tour).

On June 22, 1973, Carlos Santana released the album Love Devotion Surrender. It was a collaboration co-billed with McLaughlin, and its title came from a Chinmoy poem. In addition to the two guitarists, it featured Larry Young on piano and organ; Jan Hammer of Mahavishnu Orchestra on Hammond organ; Doug Rauch of the Santana band on bass; Billy Cobham of Mahavishnu Orchestra and Michael Shrieve of Santana on drums; and Don Alias, Mingo Lewis and Armando Peraza on percussion.

The album opened with an interpretation of the “Acknowledgement” section of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and also included a twin-acoustic guitar version of the saxophonist’s piece “Naima,” from his 1959 album Giant Steps, as well as a sprawling take on the traditional hymn “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord.” Two McLaughlin compositions, “The Life Divine” and “Meditation,” completed the album. “Naima” and “Meditation” aside, the music is loud and electric, with Santana and McLaughlin trading off screaming solos, the drummers and percussionists going wild, and Young’s organ and Rauch’s bass gluing it all together.

In June and July of 1973, Santana the band went on tour, playing shows in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, after which Carlos and McLaughlin — joined by Young, Rauch, Cobham and Peraza — embarked on a U.S. tour together. No official live recordings of those concerts were ever released, though there are bootlegs floating around.

Santana’s next release, November 1973’s Welcome, was a bridge between Carlos’s spiritual side-trips and the band’s work. It opened with a version of “Going Home,” an Alice Coltrane composition from her 1972 release Lord Of Lords, which segued seamlessly into the song “Love, Devotion & Surrender.” McLaughlin plays on one track, the 11-minute “Flame-Sky,” and Brazilian vocalist Flora Purim sings on the jazzy “Yours is the Light.” The album concludes with its title track, another John Coltrane composition.

Like Caravanserai, Welcome was a difficult album to send to radio; it featured no obvious hits, and plenty of screaming Latin-fusion instrumentals. There were no singles from it in the U.S., but a four-song, 33 1/3 RPM 7” EP was created for jukeboxes in South America, and the instrumental “Samba de Sausalito,” with “Yours is the Light” on the flip side, was released only in Colombia.

In 1974, Santana released three albums. Lotus was the first. Recorded during the band’s 12-date tour of Japan the previous year (also documented in the 72-minute film above), it came out in May. It was a triple LP with an astonishing fold-out cover depicting their tour plane, spiritual imagery, and live photos sprawled across about a dozen panels. Musically, the band was in full Latin-jazz-rock fusion mode, performing only two songs with vocals (reworked versions of “Oye Como Va” and “Black Magic Woman”) during the set’s two-hour running time. Carlos Santana’s guitar playing was at its most unfettered, doing battle with Richard Kermode and Tom Coster’s keyboards as bassist Doug Rauch held the groove down and drummer Michael Shrieve and percussionists Armando Peraza and Jose “Chepito” Areas surrounded everything and everyone with endless surging waves of rhythm.

It’s the best record Santana ever made, a two-hour slab of almost entirely instrumental Latin funk-metal with searing guitar solos, some of which quote John Coltrane at length, and dense jungles of keyboard and percussion. A half dozen of its tracks were entirely new, and even the recent and vintage material — much of it coming from Welcome — is transformed.

The obligatory run-throughs of the big hits, “Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen” and “Oye Como Va,” are much noisier and more abstract than their radio-friendly versions, and they come 20 minutes in, after an entire LP side of fiery instrumental music — “Going Home” into a new piece called “A-1 Funk” into a nearly 12-minute version of “Every Step of the Way,” from Caravanserai. There are as many organ and percussion solos as guitar outbursts, and the level of energy never flags. (Perfect example: the way the funk jam “Free Angela” is glued to “Samba de Sausalito” with an absolutely thunderous timbale break.)

It’s a breathtaking achievement on the level of Miles Davis’s Agharta, also recorded live in Japan; it’s the kind of performance that leaves you with your jaw on the floor. It was originally released only in Japan, and a European edition came out in 1975, but it didn’t come to CD until 1991, which was when I first heard it.

In 2017, Lotus was remastered and expanded, restoring it to its status as a pricey Japanese import. The new 3CD version was released on the hybrid Super Audio CD format; with the proper equipment, it can apparently be heard in its full ’70s quadraphonic glory. (I don’t have a 5.1 system, so I’ve never listened to it that way.) But more importantly, it includes seven previously unreleased tracks, a total of 36 minutes of additional music that brings the total running time to 156 minutes. Among those are several somewhat mellow showcases for vocalist Leon Thomas, including versions of Pharoah Sanders’ “Japan” and “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” Others, though, particularly “Bambele,” “Um Um Um,” and “Savor,” offer extra doses of the rampaging vitality of the original triple LP/double CD.

The packaging is amazing, too. It’s a 7” x 7” book that folds out into a wild multi-panel collage, mirroring the original triple LP design, but adding a 40-page booklet full of vintage photos and multiple liner note essays (all in Japanese, unfortunately), plus a miniature reproduction of the original tour book, and a ticket stub tucked inside.

Two months after Lotus’s initial release, in July 1974, Carlos Santana delivered Illuminations, a full-length collaboration with Alice Coltrane that opened with a benediction from Sri Chinmoy and featured a thoroughly jazz-steeped lineup of musicians that included two former Miles Davis sidemen, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Entirely instrumental, the album, which featured Indian instruments and strings alongside Coltrane’s harp, piano and Wurlitzer organ, Tom Coster’s keyboards, and Jules Broussard’s flute and soprano saxophone, represented Carlos Santana’s deepest journey into spiritual fusion. It’s quite beautiful at times, but likely alienated even more of his old fans.

Indeed, when I interviewed him in 2019, he said of this period, “Yeah, ’73 was part of that… what some friends of mine call ‘career suicide.’ I’ve been accused of committing career suicide six or seven times, but for me it’s about learning. I want to stay that seven-year-old child that’s thirsty for adventure, and sometimes it’s gonna go to radio and sometimes it’s not. But the main thing is to be true to what your heart wants to do.”

But he also said of making Illuminations, “I spent a whole week at [Alice Coltrane’s] house and we would wake up at 2:30 in the morning and meditate, and she would play the harp and then the piano and the Wurlitzer organ. I learned so much by being around her, especially the way she was writing for this symphonic thing. For me, that album… being around Alice Coltrane and Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland and Armando Peraza, it made me feel like I was in the minor leagues with Abraxas, and now I’m in the big leagues because I’m with these musicians who I felt were equipped to swim in the Pacific Ocean. I’ve said this before: There’s the Pacific Ocean, there’s a big lake, there’s a swimming pool, and then there’s a bathtub. And I was moving between the bathtub and the swimming pool until I started hanging around with them, and I was like, ‘Wow. How do they do this work? How do they articulate with such facility and incredible skill?’ So being around Alice Coltrane and John McLaughlin, and then of course Wayne [Shorter] and Herbie [Hancock], it really opened me up to improvisation in a whole different way than I’d ever known.”

In August 1974, Columbia tried to mitigate the damage he was doing to his career by issuing a Greatest Hits disc that included only tracks from the first three Santana albums. It’s sold over seven million copies. And Santana’s spiritual jazz-fusion era came to an end with October 1974’s Borboletta.

That album opened with gentle nature sounds, like Caravanserai had two years earlier, but “Life is Anew” featured soulful vocals from a new lead singer, Leon Patillo. In fact, five of its 12 tracks featured vocals, the most since his last true hit, 1971’s Santana III. Musically, it was still a fusion-oriented album, particularly on its second side. Guests included Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Airto Moreira and Flora Purim; drummer Leon Ndugu Chancler, who’d played with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Weather Report; and bassist Stanley Clarke. But it went gold in the U.S., signaling Santana’s return to commercial viability.

Beginning with 1976’s Amigos, his albums slowly climbed back up the charts. But Caravanserai, Love Devotion Surrender, Welcome, Illuminations, Borboletta and especially Lotus represent a creative and spiritual peak he’s never reached again.

That’s it for now. See you next week!