The Carlos Santana school of playing was never meant to cater to the world of the catchy single.
Santana did have their fair share of classic hits, but when listening to everything from ‘Evil Ways’ to ‘Oye Como Va’, a lot of their best moments were about creating a jam for a few minutes on record rather than trying to outrun what The Beatles had been doing years before. Because if you take the time to listen to everyone else, Carlos knew he could learn some lessons that most couldn’t properly teach.
That’s why so many musicians walk away from jam sessions with a lot more understanding of the people they are playing with. Most would think that all they needed was to know the chords of a song and be in the clear, but when you have two people soloing side by side, they’re not just playing for the sake of it. They’re having a musical conversation, and Carlos could do his fair share of talking with his fingers.
Even when he was working in his later years on Supernatural, there was still that delicate touch that made Prince want to play lead guitar. It could be harsh where it needed to be, but there was also a certain magic in the air whenever he played that made every note seem like it was beamed down from the heavens.
But if it was an honour to play amongst the fellow legends at Woodstock, Carlos was in for a trip when working with someone like Miles Davis. Compared to every other musician in rock and roll, Davis practically defied any kind of qualifier. He was the pure embodiment of music on par with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney, and for Carlos to have the luxury of playing with him meant learning much more about him as a person.
Santana’s music was always about creating that kind of mellow atmosphere, but Carlos and Davis were always the pure voices on their respective records. You could tell that neither of them played a note that they wouldn’t be happy with, and when looking back on his friendship with the jazz great, Carlos knew he was going to go down in history like one of the true icons of the genre.
The likes of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald certainly have their place in musical history, but what Davis did went beyond typical music history in Carlos’s eyes, saying, “I think he’s at that level of Stravinsky, Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso. The real geniuses have a way of stopping time so that in one instant you can feel infinity. When you hang around Miles you don’t need a Rolex watch, because the time is always now. The straight people used to say: ‘Life is short.’ The hippies said: ‘But wide.’ It was like that with Miles.”
But the beauty of Davis is that he truly never stopped making bold new choices with his music. Jazz could have stayed stagnant if he wanted it to, but whether that was moving the modal period of Kind of Blue or working in outside influences on records like Bitches Brew or Sketches of Spain, every single record that Davis put out was meant to be a new creative endeavour when he picked up his trumpet.
And given the amount of people that Carlos has worked with since his career renaissance, that adventurousness is something he took to heart. Anyone can try to play the best in their field, but it’s much more exciting doing the kind of death-defying leaps that most other musicians would have been crucified for even trying.
