Santana Moonflower (CD, Columbia Records, 1977) ****
Santana Inner Secrets (Vinyl/CD, Columbia Records, 1978) ***
Devadip Carlos Santana Oneness: Silver Dreams - Golden Reality (Vinyl/CD, Columbia Records, 1979) ***
Santana Marathon (CD, Columbia Records, 1979) **
They loom large in his legend (The Album Collection playlists): Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6
Active compensatory factors: Amigos was clearly a change in approach for Santana. The jazz fusion years were done and dusted.
New vocalist, Greg Walker, was in fine form and Tom Coster's influence was also clearly apparent. Dance Sister Dance sets out the stall right from the off and Let It Shine ends the album with a gut punch. Along the way, Carlos' guitar extravaganza - Europa, was jaw dropping.
Inner Secrets was the next studio album, and another abrupt change in style. Tom Coster was no longer in the band (although he was back for Oneness), and this was now a rock band playing rocking arrangements of some covers: Stormy, Dealer, One Chain (don't make no prison), Well Alright. Maybe they'd run out of material - I don't know.
A Carlos solo album came in the following year. While it's a 'solo' album, he also uses quite a few present or former Santana band members. The style? Well - I'll opt for jazz-rock (different to jazz fusion), but it features quite a few ballads and is an eclectic album on the whole.
Genre: Latin American rock, San Francisco rock, jazz fusion
Places I remember: Fopp, Marbecks Records, Amoeba Records, Hope collection (Marathon)
Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: I'll Be Waiting (Moonflower)
Gear costume: Savor/ Toussaint L'Overture (Moonflower)
Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: I'll Be Waiting (Moonflower)
Gear costume: Savor/ Toussaint L'Overture (Moonflower)
Active compensatory factors: Amigos was clearly a change in approach for Santana. The jazz fusion years were done and dusted.
As the mid-seventies kicked off, Santana unveiled a much poppier sound that fused funk, R&B and Mexican folk music into a winning combination.
That song would be the perfect song to follow Dance Sister Dance on Moonflower - a great live collection interspersed with some new studio songs. It's hard to see where the join is sometimes which I guess could be a criticism - these live versions stick pretty closely to the studio ones for the most part. The cover of She's Not There was a smart move, the inclusion of a lengthy drum solo is not so smart.
I like the album - I love rock music! But in the context of Santana - it seemed a little bit of a compromise to commercialise the sound.
Final album of the seventies belonged to a reconstituted Santana and Marathon. Alex Ligertwood's lead vocals are very eighties rock band oriented and tend to sound a bit dated in 2025. Marathon continued the rock approach but not as successfully as Inner Secrets.
All of that made me nervous for how the band might evolve in the eighties.
Where do they all belong? As should be obvious by now - while I love Santana and have a lot of their albums, as well as Carlos Santana's side projects, I am not a completist. For instance, missing from this post is Festival. Which I was surprised to discover when I did this post. May have to correct that aberration at some point.
Where do they all belong? As should be obvious by now - while I love Santana and have a lot of their albums, as well as Carlos Santana's side projects, I am not a completist. For instance, missing from this post is Festival. Which I was surprised to discover when I did this post. May have to correct that aberration at some point.
Into the eighties...
No comments:
Post a Comment