Carlos Santana

Carlos Santana (born July 20, 1947, Autlán de Navarro, Mexico) is a Mexican-born American musician whose popular music combined rock, jazz, blues, and Afro-Cuban rhythms with a Latin sound.

Santana began playing the violin at age five; by age eight, however, he had switched to the guitar. As a teenager, he played in bands in Tijuana, Mexico, where he was exposed not only to the local norteño music but to blues, especially to guitarists T-Bone Walker and B.B. King. Although his family moved to San Francisco in the 1960s, Santana returned frequently to Tijuana. Influenced by the San Francisco Bay Area’s burgeoning rock scene, in 1966 he formed the Santana Blues Band, which came to the attention of rock music impresario Bill Graham. The band began performing at the legendary club Fillmore West, and, though largely unknown, it triumphed at the Woodstock festival in 1969.

Signed to Columbia, Santana’s band—by then known as Santana, “Blues Band” having been dropped from the name—released a series of hit albums that infused rock with a Latin feel rooted in Afro-Cuban rhythms and that centred on Carlos’s extraordinary lead guitar playing, characterized by the distinctive sustaining of individual notes that became his trademark. Santana, featuring the top-10 hit “Evil Ways,” peaked at number four on the album charts in 1969. Abraxas, with the hits “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va,” reached number one the next year. Santana III (1971) and Caravanserai (1972) followed.

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(A Music) Man’s Best Friend

Over the next two decades, however, the group’s output was more uneven—and less commercially successful—as Santana led ever-shifting personnel toward a jazz-rock fusion that reflected his admiration for Miles Davis and John Coltrane and resulted in collaborations with jazz artists such as Buddy Miles, Stanley Clarke, and John McLaughlin. Having earlier shown an interest in spirituality, particularly the philosophy of Sri Chinmoy, Santana became a born-again Christian in 1992. Meditation and mysticism became central to his life, and he began to see himself as a musical shaman whose pursuit of songs that offered hope and healing culminated in Supernatural (1999). Supernatural—crafted with the support of such notable collaborators as pop rocker Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty, hip-hop luminary Lauryn Hill, fellow guitar legend Eric Clapton, and former Arista Records head Clive Davis—helped Santana launch an important comeback. In 2000 he won three Latin Grammy and eight Grammy awards—including album of the year for Supernatural and song of the year for “Smooth.”

Among the band’s later releases were the albums Shaman (2002), which won a Grammy for “The Game of Love”; All That I Am (2005); Corazón (2014); and Santana IV (2016). “Dar um jeito (We Will Find a Way),” a collaboration with Wyclef Jean, was the official anthem of the 2014 World Cup. In 2017 Santana and R&B legends the Isley Brothers released Power of Peace. The critically praised Africa Speaks (2019), the group’s 25th album, was made with producer Rick Rubin and Spanish singer and songwriter Concha Buika.

Santana’s lasting contribution was marked by his group’s induction (1998) into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2013 he was named a Kennedy Center honoree.